Author：Theo D'HAEN

Abstract: Introduction of the JFLC Translation Special Issue

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

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

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

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