Literary Translation as a Political Act: transferring post-war narratives from the margins to the mainstream

Date: Thursday 13 July 2023 @ 7pm Melbourne
Location: Mezzanine, 168 Lonsdale Street, Melbourne
Presenter: Dr Konstandina Dounis

Language of Presentation: English
Entry: FREE

Synopsis

The political contextualisation of literary translation has long been aligned with the official policies of nation states to ferry their literature across national divides. Export strategies in this regard, particularly post-World War Two, ultimately enhanced the promotion of national cultures via global networks, with transnational readerships and prestigious awards being rendered possible. One only has to peruse post war Nobel Prize winners to see the manifestation of this. By contrast, this presentation seeks to explore another tangent of literary translation that is inextricably linked with my own positioning within a linguistically and culturally diverse diaspora reality – this personal position gaining its impetus from long-standing political convictions centred around issues of gender and class. The translation of first-generation immigrants’ poetry and prose works into the English language, the official lingua franca of Australia, has the potential to widen this country’s national literary canon to include narratives that have hitherto been silenced. Moreover, that this ‘silencing’ pertains to working class narratives depicting the actual lived experience of the mass-migratory post-war era, renders the extant portrait of ‘post war immigrant life’ deplete both in terms of the history of the diaspora and of the nation at large. Revisionist readings of these literary works provide a welcome opportunity to re-negotiate hitherto officially sanctioned historical perspectives, imbuing the resultant socio-cultural mosaic with invaluable detail and texture.

Bio

Dr Konstandina Dounis is a cultural historian, author and literary translator. Greek-Australian literature, history and culture has been the axis around which her research has revolved. Her doctoral thesis, The Shadow and the Muse, entails extensive forays into unearthing immigrant women’s texts, examining their propensity to challenge historically entrenched perspectives relating to gender-based invisibility. She is the recipient of the Monash University MSA Award for Teaching Excellence 2018; AALITRA Award for Literary Translation 2020, 2nd Prize; GACL Literary Competition Prose 2020, 1st Prize. Her most recent publication: ‘Poetry and Post-War Immigration from Europe’ The Cambridge History of Australian Poetry. She teaches within the Faculty of Education at Monash University and, as of February 2020, works with the Monash Education Academy whose central mandate is the university-wide enhancement of teaching practice.