{"id":12070,"date":"2026-10-29T09:55:08","date_gmt":"2026-10-29T09:55:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usvl.sav.sk\/wp\/?p=12070&lang=en"},"modified":"2026-10-29T09:54:16","modified_gmt":"2026-10-29T09:54:16","slug":"guest-lecture-searching-for-eva-bloch-computational-approaches-to-translator-attribution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usvl.sav.sk\/wp\/?p=12058","title":{"rendered":"Guest lecture \u2013 Searching for Eva Bloch: Computational Approaches to Translator Attribution"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Lucija Mandi\u0107<\/strong>
\n(ZRC SAZU Institute of Slovenian Literature and Literary Studies, Institute of World Literature SAS)<\/p>\n

4 November 2026 (Wednesday) at 10:00 CET<\/strong>
\nInstitute of World Literature SAS + online<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Join Zoom Meeting:<\/strong>
\nhttps:\/\/us06web.zoom.us\/j\/89321224888?pwd=IvAPrbFdbQME9add5EZIZijqbYQ4is.1<\/a>
\nMeeting ID: 893 2122 4888
\nPasscode: 413130<\/p>\n

The lecture is presented as part of the mobility project Translating Central Europe: Milan Kundera\u2019s Oeuvre Across Languages, Borders, and Political Contexts<\/em> and the IMPULZ project Translation and Cross-Lingual Stylistic Transfer: Towards a Theory of Language Contact in Literature<\/em>, both supported by the Slovak Academy of Sciences.<\/p>\n

In 1990, Milan Kundera\u2019s novel Nesmrtelnost<\/em> was published in French as L\u2019Immortalit\u00e9<\/em>, translated by a certain Eva Bloch. Kundera repeatedly referred to her as a \u201cclose friend,\u201d yet Jan Rube\u0161, another Czech\u2013French translator, said of her: \u201cWho is this Eva Bloch? I, personally, have translated a dozen books from Czech into French and so know most, if not all, the translators working in the field, but I have never heard the name of Eva Bloch.\u201d Searches in library databases and archival catalogues reveal that Eva Bloch appears exclusively in connection with Kundera\u2019s work, raising legitimate doubts about her existence. Given Kundera\u2019s well-documented involvement in translating and revising his works, several scholars have suggested that L\u2019Immortalit\u00e9<\/em> may represent his first attempt at writing directly in French or at self-translation. With the archival evidence that might solve this mystery largely out of reach, computational stylometry might offer another way to search for clues. Stylometry has been successfully applied to authorship attribution in original literary works, but identifying translators comes with its own set of complications. A translation inevitably carries traces of both the original author\u2019s style and that of the translator, making it difficult to distinguish between the two. And what happens when the author is also the translator, or extensively revises the translation? Using the case of Eva Bloch, the lecture will discuss these problems and present a series of stylometric experiments comparing L\u2019Immortalit\u00e9<\/em> with Kundera\u2019s original French novels and other French translations of Czech literature, asking what such methods can tell us about translation, self-translation, and multilingual authorship.<\/p>\n

Lucija Mandi\u0107<\/strong> is a researcher at the ZRC SAZU Institute of Slovenian Literature and Literary Studies and the Institute of World Literature SAS. Her research focuses on Slovenian and West Slavic literatures, computational literary studies, cultural nationalism, and cultural transfer. She is a member of two research committees of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA), focusing on digital comparative literature and language contact in literature. She is a co-editor of a special issue of Primerjalna knji\u017eevnost<\/em> titled \u201cBig Data, Small Literatures\u201d (2024).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lucija Mandi\u0107 (ZRC SAZU Institute of Slovenian Literature and Literary Studies, Institute of World Literature SAS) 4 November 2026 (Wednesday) at 10:00 CET Institute of World Literature SAS + online     Join Zoom Meeting: https:\/\/us06web.zoom.us\/j\/89321224888?pwd=IvAPrbFdbQME9add5EZIZijqbYQ4is.1 Meeting ID: 893 2122 4888 Passcode: 413130 The lecture is presented as part of the mobility project Translating Central … Pokra\u010dova\u0165 na Guest lecture \u2013 Searching for Eva Bloch: Computational Approaches to Translator Attribution<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12070","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pozvanky"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usvl.sav.sk\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usvl.sav.sk\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usvl.sav.sk\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usvl.sav.sk\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usvl.sav.sk\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12070"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/usvl.sav.sk\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12070\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12078,"href":"https:\/\/usvl.sav.sk\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12070\/revisions\/12078"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usvl.sav.sk\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usvl.sav.sk\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usvl.sav.sk\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}