The Translation Memoir: An Introduction

ABSTRACT

This introduction presents the frame and contents of this volume devoted to the translation memoir. The translation memoir is formed at the intersection of life writing and translation studies, in which translators interweave reflections on their practice, craft, texts they translate and positionalities they occupy. As such it is a kind of creative-critical research carried out by translators. It offers a unique entry into texts, languages, cultures and the work of translation. The contributions included in the volume explore the way in which the subject position of writing can be displaced and problematised by inserting the translator's voice and subjectivity into a text, as the translator is precisely the player within a textual ecology who is supposed to not occupy a central position, but reside on the margins, invisible or couched in shadows, speaking only through the voice of another. The writings discussed in this volume, and in some cases the writings themselves, are thus a form of translational experimentation insofar as they break some of the rules, or push the limits of translation as precisely that which is not traditionally considered an original, authored writing. As such it is also a location from which to carry out critiques of other dominant paradigms such as national or gender-based oppressions.

KEYWORDS:

• Translation studies
• translation memoir
• memoir
• creative-critical research

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Delphine Grass

Delphine Grass is Senior Lecturer in French and Comparative Literature at Lancaster University (UK). Her most recent academic publications include Translation as Creative-Critical Practice (2023, Cambridge University Press) and two forthcoming collective volumes on translation and experimental life writing she is co-editing with Lily Robert-Foley. Her current academic interests are in translation, creative-criticism, multilingual literature and the environmental humanities. She is a poet and author of three bilingual poetry chapbooks: Feuilles Doubles (A Verse, 2017), La Traversée (Les Céphéides, 2013) and Oyster, Oyster! (Contre Histoire de l’Huitre) (Les Céphéides, 2013). She is also a poetry translator working from French and the Alsatian dialect.

Lily Robert-Foley

Lily Robert-Foley is Associate Professor in the English department at the University of Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3. She is the author of Experimental Translation: The Work of Translation in the Age of Algorithmic Production (forthcoming from Goldsmiths Press 2024). She is also the author of four books of poetry including m, a book of poetry-critique collage (Corrupt Press, 2013), graphe machine, a chapbook of visual poetry (Xerolage, 2013), Jiji, a novel in prose poems andconceptual writing (Omnia Vanitas Press, 2016), and The Duty to Presence, a book of poetic autotheory, forthcoming from the To collection of the Presses Universitaires de Rouen, along with its translation by Anne-Laure Tissut. She has translated two books of poetry, by Claude Ber and Sophie Loizeau, and she is a member of the Outranspo, an international group of experimental translators.