Prismatic Jane Eyre

This is a current project at the Oxford Comparative Criticism & Translation (OCCT):

Prismatic Translation
(...) Here is a fuller account of the prismatic approach: Translation can be seen as producing a text in one language that will count as equivalent to a text in another. It can also be seen as a release of multiple signifying possibilities, an opening of the source text to Language in all its plurality. The first view is underpinned by the regime of European standard languages which can be lined up in bilingual dictionaries, by the technology of the printed book, and by the need for regulated communication in political and legal contexts. The second view attaches to contexts where several spoken languages share the same written characters (as in the Chinese scriptworld), to circumstances where language is not standardised (e.g., minority & dialectal communities & oral cultures), to the fluidity of electronic text, and to literature, especially poetry and theatrical performance. The first view sees translation as a channel; the second as a prism.

The Prismatic Translation Project has four elements:

1. Thoretical Foundations. Research presented at the 2015 conference and 2016 workshop is being developed into a book, to be published by Legenda in OCCT's partner series Transcript.

2. Prismatic Jane Eyre. This collaborative experiment looks closely at Bronte's novel as it is translated into multiple languages, understanding this process as transformation and growth rather than as loss. The results will be presented in an open-access online publication, and in various digital visualisations.

Here is a fuller description: is comparative close reading possible in a global context? How can it be framed and what might it discover? ‘Prismatic Jane Eyre’ seeks to answer these questions, taking as its focus a novel that has been multiply translated both between and within a very large number of languages. Through comparative close reading of parallel passages we will notice shifts and transformations, tracing how the text is re-realised in different linguistic media with diverse affordances and limits. Grammar and semantics, politics and history, textual productivity and the agency of translators will all be at issue. The project is fundamentally a matter of collaboration and conversation between human beings, though we will also explore how digital technology can aid and visualise our research. Jane Eyre has become our focus for a combination of reasons: it has been very frequently translated, is out of copyright, and is both popular and canonical; and it is a conflicted text with a probing relationship to language, place, identity, metaphor and genre – all elements which play out differently in translation.

And here is a list of current participants and languages: Rebecca Gould (Birmingham - languages of the Caucasus), Alessandro Grilli (Pisa - Italian), Yunte Huang (UCSB - Chinese), Madli Kütt (Tartu - Estonian), Emrah Serdan (Istanbul - Turkish), Adriana Jacobs (Oxford - Hebrew), Claudia Pazos Alonso & Ana Marques dos Santos ( Oxford & Lisbon - Portuguese), Ulrich Timme Kragh, Abhishek Jain & Magdalena Szpindler (Poznan - Tibetan, Hindi, Mongolian), Jernej Habjan (Ljubljana - Slovenian), Céline Sabiron, Léa Koves & Vincent Thiery (Lorraine - French), Sowon Park (UCSB - Korean), Yousif Qasmiyeh (Oxford - Arabic), Eleni Philippou (Oxford - Greek), Yorimitsu Hashimoto (Osaka - Japanese), Kasia Szymanska (Oxford - Polish), Andrés Claro (Chile - Spanish - Chilean/Latin American/Peninsular), Marcos Novak (UCSB – digital media), Richard Rowley (Oxford – digital media), Tom Cheesman (Swansea – digital media).

3. Multilingual Creative Writing in Schools (...)

4. Babel: Adventures in Translation (...)

Here you can read about a first tentative approach to Mapping translation – on the trail of Jane Eyre by Rachel Dryden and an account of a recent (in October) workshop on the subject:

At the workshop, Prismatic Jane Eyre: Close-reading a global novel across languages, this band of researchers explored the novel’s rendering in a myriad of languages. Arabic, Hebrew, Modern Greek, Polish, Mongolian, Tibetan, Korean, Spanish, and French are just a few of the diverse languages that were represented at the workshop. The workshop was structured as an alternation between segments of multilingual close reading and discussion in which the general issues arising from the readings were probed. Through a comparative close reading of parallel passages, the researchers noticed textual variations and departures. One of the explicit aims of the workshop was to discover what can emerge from a comparative close reading of multiple translations, and to trace the factors that contribute to textual shifts and changes. The workshop not only offered some fascinating discoveries but laid the basis for a further workshop in spring or summer 2018 leading to a print or digital publication. (Eleni Philippou)