Author：Theo D'HAEN

Abstract: Introduction of the JFLC Translation Special Issue

Vol. 9 No. 1 June 2025      Time：2025-07-17 View Citation

Author：Susan BASSNETT

Abstract: This essay argues that translations are shaped by the needs and expectations of the target culture, and given that aesthetic and cultural norms change over time, there is a constant need for retranslations. The creative translation work of classicists such as Anne Carson and Josephine Balmer serves to illustrate the divergency of translation practice where there is no reliable source version. Two examples further explore how ancient texts are reconfigured: Cieran Carson’s rending of the Irish epic The Tain and Sioned Davies’s version of the Welsh epic The Mabinogion. Translators today have more freedom to exercise their own creativity as we recognize the unreliability of source texts that have undergone countless changes over time.

Vol. 9 No. 1 June 2025      Time：2025-07-17 View Citation

Author：ZHANG Longxi

Abstract: This essay explores several aspects or dimensions of literary translation. First, translation offers pleasure in the reading experience, and for translators, literary translation is a creative or re-creative activity. Sometimes, a translation may become a better work than the original. Second, the ideas of incommensurability and untranslatability are misleading and harmful, and the so-called critique of the “hegemony” of English is not only disingenuous and hypocritical but also prevents non-Western literary works from being translated and known in the world as part of world literature. Finally, with several concrete examples, this essay argues for the importance of cultural understanding in successful translations.

Vol. 9 No. 1 June 2025      Time：2025-07-17 View Citation

Author：Leanne Rae DARNBROUGH

Abstract: This paper compares the linguistic revolutions of Russian Cubo-Futurist Velimir Khlebnikov and the American avant-garde poet and publisher Eugene Jolas in terms of their translatability. These two are prime examples for comparison because both were not only avid poets, but also renegade theorists engaged in apotropaic linguistic revolutions, desperately striving to stave off (or at least delay) the looming apocalypse via their words. While Khlebnikov strives to recreate a primeval language of transparency based on an exoteric mathematical structure, Eugene Jolas intentionally mixes languages to reflect more about their relations than mere words. Both strategies render the poetry of Khlebnikov and Jolas practically untranslatable but for very divergent reasons.

Vol. 9 No. 1 June 2025      Time：2025-07-17 View Citation

Author：Harish TRIVEDI

Abstract: This is an article about a major poetic text that was partially lost in the original language but many centuries later found in translation in two other countries and languages: the foundational epic biography of the Buddha, composed in Sanskrit c. the 1st/2nd century CE by Ashvaghosha, the Buddhacharita. Nine versions of this text are examined, which were produced successively in Sanskrit, Chinese, Tibetan, English, Hindi, and back into Sanskrit. After a meta-textual overview, a close discussion is offered of some significantly divergent cultural details. Also taken into consideration is a hugely popular ...

Vol. 9 No. 1 June 2025      Time：2025-07-17 View Citation

Author：José Luís JOBIM, Bethania MARIANI

Abstract: This article proposes that the translation violence of the colonizing process—in terms of the confrontation between oral languages and ones with written grammars—coupled with the institutionalization of a given language as the national one, contains both a memory of the silencing of indigenous languages and cultures, and of transculturation. The latter, in turn, manifests itself, among other ways, through books that in different ways deal with the relationship between the West and descendants of the first-nation peoples of South America (especially in Circum-Roraima, the triple-border ...

Vol. 9 No. 1 June 2025      Time：2025-07-17 View Citation

Author：Péter HAJDU

Abstract: In semi-peripheral and peripheral cultures, where the status of literary translation tends to be high, respectable poets with significant institutional prestige produce many translations. The purpose can be twofold: to mediate foreign literature to a domestic audience, and to develop the vernacular poetic diction through experimenting with the various ways of expressing alien literariness. Both parts of this description of the purpose of translation are target oriented, but the selection of what to translate is also important. Hungarian modernist poets of the 20th century undertook several major translation projects, and also published collections of poetic translations. Volumes of translations by a single translator...

Vol. 9 No. 1 June 2025      Time：2025-07-17 View Citation

Author：Anders PETTERSSON

Abstract: In my article, I base myself on 19 different translations into English of Li Bai’s well-known poem “Jing Ye Si” (静夜思). These translations were published between 1898 and 2019, and I comment on how the ways of converting “Jing Ye Si” into a poem in English have changed over time. But first and foremost, I look at how various translators have dealt with some specific translation problems in the poem and with the overall challenge of recreating “Jing Ye Si” in English as an artistic whole. I conclude with some more general reflections on texts, meanings, and translations.

Vol. 9 No. 1 June 2025      Time：2025-07-17 View Citation

Author：Peina ZHUANG, Steven TÖTÖSY de ZEPETNEK

Abstract: In this article, we present an application of Anton Popović’s 1976 Dictionary for the Analysis of Literary Translation and its revised versions by Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek. We analyze Xu Yuanchong’s translation of the poem “A Moonlit Night on the Spring River” with regard to the translator’s attitude, the equivalence of translation, the historical and cultural encoding of translation, and the adaptability of translation. We argue that the taxonomy’s application in translation studies provides a new research paradigm and analytical framework for the study of literary translation and the translation of classical Chinese literature in particular.

Vol. 9 No. 1 June 2025      Time：2025-07-17 View Citation

Author：Paul TENNGART

Abstract: This article explores the intricate relation between translation and the Nobel Prize in Literature through the lens of a special case: the 1939 award to Finnish novelist Frans Eemil Sillanpää. The discussions in the Nobel committee, and the decision of the Swedish Academy to select Sillanpää for the prize, were deeply affected by the long and complicated political and cultural history of neighbors Sweden and Finland, as well as the Soviet bombings of several Finnish cities in the autumn of 1939. This article argues, however, that the translations of Sillanpää’s novels into Swedish were just as important, and...

Vol. 9 No. 1 June 2025      Time：2025-07-17 View Citation