Category: Academic work

Transculturating for Wordliness / Verbe, monde et transculturation /

Stephanos Stephanides, « Transculturating for Wordliness », Transtext(e)s Transcultures 跨文本跨文化 [En ligne], 1 | 2006, mis en ligne le 13 septembre 2009, consulté le 06 mai 2016. URL : http://transtexts.revues.org/161 ; DOI : 10.4000/transtexts.161

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Transculturating for Wordliness

When I was a student in Britain many years ago, as a migrant out of language and out of place, a “Hellene” and a “post-colonial Cypriot”, I was troubled by the linear periodization of my literary studies, which led me from Beowulf to T.S. Eliot and left me asking myself where I belong – looking for the chance connections and turbulence that brought me into that classroom. In the too easy alignment of language, culture, and nation, I was always wanting to move sideward and across, above and below. While my comparatist impulse took me to Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian studies, I found the same linear periodization of Spain and Portugal and peripheralization of the extra-European space as I did in the study of English literature. Continue reading “Transculturating for Wordliness / Verbe, monde et transculturation /” →

Translation and Ethnography in Literary Transaction (2006)

About Translation and Ethnography in Literary Transaction from p. 254 of Lindberg-Wada, Gunilla. Studying Transcultural Literary History. Walter de Gruyter, 2006. Print.
In the introduction, Lindberg-Wada writes: “In a wild chase over continents,  [Stephanos Stephanides’s paper ‘Translation and Ethnography in Literary Transaction’] seems to carry the problem of translatability to its extreme by demonstrating theat real ‘cross-cultural transfer’ is equal to creolization and hybridization (criollismo). With reference to Borges and others Stephanides suggests that these are ‘the formative processes in cultural production.’ From this one might, perhaps, draw the conclusion that the scale of translatability, ranging from universals to culture-specific elements, becomes meaningless. Cross-cultural transfer is integrated in cultural dynamics of another kind. The ‘specific’ becomes ‘universal’ – and simple ‘translation remains inadequate.”