Brian James Baer

Translation Studies Forum: Translation and censorship

Notably absent from this lengthy list, however, are readers, who under conditions of censorship often exercise an agency that is fraught with political implications and risk. Consider, for example, the Soviet phenomenon of samizdat, which relied on interested readers to reproduce and circulate forbidden texts, or the thriving black market in foreign literature that arose in response to the Russian reader’s demand for works of world literature. It is time, I believe, to study the reader as a full-fledged agent of translation. Ilan Stavans partly addresses Kuhiwczak’s omission by noting the Eurocentrism of Kuhiwczak’s views. To that end, Stavans focuses on cultures outside the developed West, specifically on Latin America, where subaltern polyglots adopted ‘‘a path of resistance’’ to the hegemonic control of European imperial languages and cultures (Spanish, English and French) through the use of their pre-Colombian aboriginal tongues. Stavans’s observations are an important corrective but, considered in isolation, they may tempt one to imagine this form of linguistic resistance as somehow unique to ‘‘Third World’’ (post-)colonial contexts. While acknowledging the historical, political and linguistic specificity of those contexts, I would like to make several comments concerning the reader of translations under censorship that may apply more broadly and may help to conceptualize the unique brand of agency exercised by the reader of translations, in general, and by the ‘‘minority reader’’, in particular. Translation Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2012, 95 110

Translating queer texts in Soviet Russia

This article contributes to recent scholarship on censorship and translation by exploring the phenomenon of productive censorship, or the artful evasion of censorship restrictions by authors and their readers, in the context of Soviet Russia. Specifically, the work of three homosexual-identified literary translators – Mikhail Kuzmin, Ivan Likhachev and Gennadii Shmakov – is examined in order to demonstrate how, under conditions of institutionalized homophobia, they were able to circulate translations of texts that were open to queer interpretations. Queer readings of works by such authors as William Shakespeare, Charles Baudelaire, Constantine Cavafy and James Baldwin were enabled by a variety of factors including biographical information about the source text author, sub-cultural interpretive traditions, and access to alternative interpretations, often from abroad. One effect of successful evasion of this kind is to establish alternative interpretive communities within the official literary culture.

Body or Soul: Representing Lesbians in Post-Soviet Russian Culture

This article examines representations of lesbians in contemporary Russian literature and film as expressions of a host of post-Soviet anxieties over the social, political, and economic turmoil following the fall of communism. In particular, the author examines three recurrent motifs: the lesbian as narcissist; the lesbian as prostitute; and the lesbian as predator. While many authors and filmmakers present these qualities as a threat to the (patriarchal) social order, others celebrate those very attributes as a liberating alternative to the narrow roles traditionally available to Russian women, which stress their qualities of maternal love and self-sacrifice.

Heekyoung Cho, Translation’s forgotten history. Russian literature, Japanese mediation, and the formation of modern Korean literature

If Translation’s Forgotten History didn’t exist, someone would have had to invent it. I say this because this book makes such an eloquent and convincing argument for the full integration of transla...

De-sacralizing the origin(al) and the transnational future of Translation Studies

ABSTRACT This article begins with the premise that the shift from source-oriented approaches in Translation Studies to target-oriented approaches has left the concept of the original largely undertheorized. As such it remains haunted by Romantic notions of originality that in turn associate translation with loss, distortion, and contamination. Tracing the transnational circulation of a Russian-themed English poem, Thomas Moore’s ‘Those Evening Bells’, and its Russian translation, the author models a kind of cultural transfer that has long been ignored in literary studies and translation studies as ‘inauthentic’. Only by historicizing the concept of the original, the author argues, can Translation Studies fully participate in the transnational turn in cultural studies, serving as an important critical site for interrogating the legacy of Romanticism it has until now merely replicated.

Sexual Minorities in Modern Russia

This article outlines the history of sexual minorities in modern Russia, beginning with a discussion of the methodological challenges posed by the interpretation of Western sources, on the one hand, and of Russias discursive silence, on the other. The history of Russias sexual minorities is divided into three historical periods: prerevolutionary Russia, Soviet Russia, and post-Soviet Russia. Special attention is paid to the differences between literary and other representations of homosexuality and the descriptions of gay and lesbian life provided in the diaries of Russian gays and lesbians, revealing a deep-seated ambivalence regarding the phenomenon of homosexuality in Russia.