ABSTRACT

This collection brings together work from Memory Studies and Translation Studies to explore the role of interlingual and intercultural translation for unpacking transcultural memory dynamics, focusing on memories of violent pasts across different literary genres.

The book explores the potential of a research agenda that links narrower definitions of translation with broader notions of transfer, transmission, and relocation across temporal and cultural borders, investigating the nuanced theoretical and conceptual dimensions at the intersection of memory and translation. The volume explores memories of violent pasts – legacies of war, genocide, dictatorship, and exile across different genres and media, including testimony, autobiography, novels, and graphic novels. The collection engages in central questions at the interface of Memory Studies and Translation Studies, including whether traumatic historical experiences that resist representation can be translated, what happens when texts that negotiate such memories are translated into other languages and cultures, and what role translation strategies, translators, and agents of translations play in memory across borders.

The volume will be of particular interest to students and scholars in Translation Studies, Memory Studies, and Comparative Literature.

chapter |8 pages

Introduction

Translating Memories of Violent Pasts

chapter 3|15 pages

‘As if Carved in Stone'

Primo Levi and the (In)Stability of Memory in Translation

chapter 4|20 pages

From ‘Living on' to ‘Still Alive' and ‘Lost on the Way'

Exile, Memory, and Intersectionality as a Translation ‘of One's Own' in Ruth Klüger's Autobiographical Texts

chapter 5|16 pages

Modiano's Dark Light of Remembrance in Translation

Paratextual Mediation of La place de l'étoile in German, Dutch, and English

chapter 8|14 pages

Translatio inferni

Roberto Bolaño's Memory of the Nazis in America

chapter 9|19 pages

Translating Genocide?

The Case of the Witness Esther Mujawayo

chapter 10|16 pages

Translating Wounds in the Contemporary Memoir

The Genocide in Rwanda and Its Aftermath in Clemantine Wamariya's The Girl Who Smiled Beads

chapter 13|20 pages

The Graphic Memoir in a Translational Perspective

Childhood Memories of War in Zeina Abirached's Mourir partir revenir: Le jeu des hirondelles and Je me souviens Beyrouth

chapter 14|14 pages

Bridging Communities Affected by Past Conflict

Translation and the Processes of Memory