Eugenia Kelbert Rudan: Romain Gary’s Collaborative Self-Translation and the Translational

Online talk
Dr. Eugenia Kelbert Rudan, University of East Anglia
Wednesday 26^th May 2021 at 14.00

This talk focuses on the possibility of translational processes beyond translation through a genetic editing approach to an understudied phenomenon in translation studies, which I call collaborative self-translation (CST), i.e. a self-translator’s practice of involving a hired translator to provide an initial translation of an entire work, later to be revised extensively by the author. With a focus on Romain Gary and to a lesser extent Vladimir Nabokov as its case studies, it argues that an inductive extension of our notion of the translational can shed light on the ways in which our notions of the translational may meaningfully extend beyond translation and thus offer a pathway to distinguishing between literal and metaphorical use of translation in literary theory. It thus suggests a potential alternative to existing translational discourse in interdisciplinary settings, as well as presenting a view of collaborative self-translation as a practice that can be fruitfully theorized within multiple paradigms in translation studies.

Dr. Eugenia Kelbert Rudan is Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at British Centre for Literary Translation at University of East Anglia and Assistant Professor of Philology at HSE University, Moscow (currently on leave). She studied philosophy and translation studies at the Sorbonne, French and German at University of Oxford, and comparative literature at Yale. Her PhD dissertation, „Acquiring a Second Language Literature: Patterns in Translingual Writing from Modernism to the Moderns“ (2015) under the supervision of Haun Saussy and Vladimir Alexandrov, was awarded the Charles Bernheimer Prize by the American Comparative Literature Association. She is an active member of the Centre for Multilingualism at University of Oslo (MultiLing), DARIAH Belgrade Centre for Digital Humanities (CDH), and ITEM CNRS (Institut de textes et manuscripts modernes, team Multilinguisme, traduction, création) in Paris. She co-developed Bukvik, an original collaborative tool for Digital Humanities research and cross-lingual stylistic analysis, http://bukvik.litterra.net/.

FOTO – https://complit.yale.edu/