Gostujoče predavanje dr. Táňe Dluhošove

Vabljeni na predavanje dr. Táňe Dluhošove, direktorice Instituta za orientalistiko na Češki akademiji znanosti, o poustvarjanju tajvanske književnosti s prevajanjem (»Visualizing Bentuhua: The Recreation of Taiwanese Literature through Translation«). Predavanje bo v četrtek, 4. maja 2023, ob 16.20 uri v predavalnici 34, FF UL. Predavanje bo v angleškem jeziku.  

Dr. Táňa Dluhošová is the director at the Oriental Institute (Czech Academy of Sciences) and acted as the director of its Research Center at the Academia Sinica (in years 2015–2017, 2019). She studies, among other things, the post-war Taiwanese literary scene by applying Digital Humanities methods; censorship; language and ideology; and Taiwanese elites.

Abstract: A translation has the potential both to effect and affect a cultural paradigm. And if one translation can do so much, we might ask what could an anthology of translations do? Or, what might forty-seven anthologies accomplish? What is more, we could ask similar questions about the editors who produce such volumes. This presentation, based on an article co-authored by Bert Scruggs (UCI), considers the influence of both Taiwan Literature: English Translation Series (hereafter TLETS) and the journal’s founding editor Tu Kuo-ch’ing.

We wanted to know more about the Taiwanese literature that the labor of Tu and the pages of TLETS were (re)creating in translation and how or if it differed from that stemming from the labor and pages of other editors and other journals and anthologies. Our findings suggest Tu and TLETS have recreated the translation of Taiwanese literature of and about the experiences of the people of the island, that in fact, it parallels a Taiwanese movement in the latter decades of the twentieth century that validated the experiences of the Taiwanese people, a movement that is literally grounded in the land, or more specifically “this land” [bentu] of Taiwan and the localization or indigenization [bentuhua] of culture.

For this research project, we created lists of contents of translated Taiwanese literature for the following regions: the United States of America, France, Germany, the Czech Republic, Italy, and Taiwan. The dataset comprises 5,297 literary pieces that were included on the pages of twenty-nine different journals not necessarily dedicated to Taiwanese literature. In addition to journals, the dataset also includes the contents of 244 volumes, both single-author, and anthologies.