Translation and Citation: Creative Entanglements

Article submission deadline: 30 June 2023

Editors:
Marta Pacheco Pinto (University of Lisbon)
Matteo Rei (University of Turin)

It is not perhaps an oversimplification to state that all translation is to a certain extent a mediated citation of a previous, foreign text. From the Latin citare, etymologically citation refers to the process of setting in motion, moving, just as translation, from the Latin translatus, means to “carry across”. Translation is therefore inhabited by the idea of movement, mobility, or transfer – in a word, by citation.

In 2017, in Translation as Citation: Zhuangzi Inside Out Haun Saussy examined citation by considering “a series of translations that do not so much make an expression in the target language as find it (thus reversing the sequence in which the original necessarily precedes the translation), as well as renderings that do not express the original content in words that already existed in the target language, but import words or constructions (via loan words, calques, transliterations) directly from the source to the target language” (2017: 2-3). Whereas the first translation mode is about citing from the repertoire available in the target language, the second is about citing the source text itself, rendering foreignness visible in particular through non-translation or transliteration. Ultimately translating as a labour of language is about finding a solution in the target language that readers recognize fully or in part as pertaining to that language community. In this sense, translation is always citational – it is as much a fact of the target culture (Toury 2012 [1995]) as specifically of the target language. On the one hand, this citational nature turns the spotlight on citation as a potential metaphor for translating, which has implications for the conceptualization of translation and translatorship. On the other hand, one issue that still needs to be addressed more thoroughly is how translators react to the presence of foreign bodies within the text for translation, that is, how translators deal with citationary practices when they are part of an author’s creative process (e.g., Dei and Guerinicchio 2008).

Texts are indisputably living bodies inhabited by difference in the most diverse ways. Citations – in the form of epigraphs, quotations, or references – are literary devices that draw attention to their own difference and unveil a text’s organic nature and polyphony, in addition to highlighting writers’ intimate engagement or affinities with the world outside their own. Citation materializes a foreign presence as a subtle or, on the contrary, more obvious invasive practice resulting nonetheless from an act of hospitality, whereby a textual fragment of a foreign body is welcomed into another textual body.

If a fruitful discussion of citation cannot do without a reflection on hospitality and foreignness, it can neither generally be approached outside the frame of a theory of intertextuality – from Julia Kristeva to Roland Barthes in the 1960s, from Antoine Compagnon to Gérard Genette in the 1980s. Within Genette’s (1982) understanding of intertextuality as a relation of textual co-presence whereby texts communicate and dialogue with one another, at least three modes of intertextuality can be identified, and easily displayed in a scale from more overt to more covert intertextuality: citation, plagiarism, and allusion. Only the first two intertextuality cases are here considered for being diametrically opposed and dichotomous. Citation is a literal, explicit intertext that is typographically marked as such (via quotation marks or italics) and usually followed by the identification of its original author; in its quality as a foreign textual body, it activates readers’ literary or cultural memory. By contrast, plagiarism is a covert, non-explicit, hidden citation. It either seeks to pass off as one’s own words, or the intertextual reference may be so obviously shared between writer and reader that it dismisses any authorial attribution and becomes symbolical rather than an outrageous appropriation. There are a handful of works on plagiarism in literary translation that deal with it from the perspective of copyright law, yet few examine it from a symbolic or historiographical/historical standpoint. In his Marvellous Thieves. Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights, Paulo Horta highlights “the porous boundary between translation and theft, and between imitation and ventriloquism”, and exposes apropos Richard Francis Burton “a chain of plagiarism”, Burton’s style being, so Horta argues, deployed to mask and “claim ownership over what he steals” (2017: 13 and 252). How does a translator respond when plagiarism is intertwined with an author’s writing and when the translator him/herself resorts to such procedures? When is plagiarism a betrayal or instead a form of flattery (Horta 2017: 254)?

Assuming translation as a task carried out by an inherently creative agent, our take here towards translation is twofold: translation as citation and citation in translation. We are interested in original contributions – case studies, historical analyses or more theoretical approaches – that reflect on or illuminate the implications of either of these movements and add new perspectives to the multiple interconnections between translation and citation by furthering any of the following topics:

• Citation as a challenge for translation. How do translators deal with quotations in the text they are translating? What happens when there are several available translations into the same target language, or on the contrary no readily available equivalent? What are the aesthetic or ethical implications of translators’ choices?
• Translation, citation and inherent links to creativity and an author’s poetics. Citation being the manifestation or appropriation of a given authorial agency, what happens when translators fail to account for those complex networks of interdependence? What happens when a writer forges or, on the contrary, dissimulates a citational link, as is the case with pseudo-translations or pseudo-originals?
• Citation as a metaphor for translation. Can citation as a translation metaphor bring new insights into this phenomenon? What does it entail regarding the notions of authorship and translatorship?
• Translation and plagiarism. How has translation history been shaped by plagiarist practices or episodes? When are translators plagiarists, or when is plagiarism part of an author’s creative style and how does a translator deal with it?
• Retranslation and citation. How does the writer of a new translation of a text that already exists translated into the same target language deal with either the burden of the preexisting translation(s) or the temptation of ceding into the citation, or plagiarism, of a previous translation choice that seems best?
• Self-translation and citation. Can citation shed new light on self-translation (either overt or covert) considering that self-translation may be approached as a mode of (not) citing a previously existing text? How does it illuminate self-translation practices?
• Citation as a narrative device in fictional representations of translators and translation. When does citation serve as a trace of a translator character’s multilingualism or cultural hybridity? As fictional characters, translators are oftentimes associated with kleptomaniac, kidnapping tendencies (e.g., Dezsö Kosztolányi’s The Kleptomaniac Translator) or with ventriloquism, when they are perceived as parroting other people’s words and voice. What are the implications of such metaphors and imagery towards the task of translation and regarding the translator figure?

We especially encourage submissions on topics that reach beyond Western cultures, as well as submissions from doctoral students and early-career researchers. Submitted articles may be written in English, Portuguese, Spanish, or French, and should range between 6,000 and 8,000 words, including notes, references, an abstract of 150 to 250 words, as well as 4 to 6 keywords. Authors must follow the formatting guidelines listed in the Submissions section under Author Guidelines on the journal’s website. Submissions must include a separate document containing a short biographical note of the author, up to 150 words.

Questions and expressions of interest can be sent to the editors, Marta Pacheco Pinto (mpinto6@campus.ul.pt) and Matteo Rei (matteo.rei@unito.it).

Online submission: to register and submit your article for peer review, please follow the hyperlink Make a Submission on the Compendium homepage before June 30, 2023.

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References:

• Dei, Adele, and Rita Guerinicchio, eds. 2008. Il libro invisibile: forme della citazione nel Novecento. Roma: Bulzoni.
• Genette, Gérard. 1982. Palimpsestes: la littérature au second degré. Paris: Seuil.
• Horta, Paulo. 2017. Marvellous Thieves. Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Saussy, Haun. 2017. Translation as Citation: Zhuangzi Inside Out. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 
• Toury, Gideon. 2012 [1995]. Descriptive Translation Studies – and beyond. Revised edition. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.