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- The poetics of movement & translation: the case of Richard Zimler's strawberry fields foreverPublication . Lopes, AlexandraThe article focuses on a novel with a convoluted publishing history: Richard Zimler’s Strawberry Fields Forever. As a narrative about migrants, its publishing trajectory constitutes in itself a migration story. In 2011, Zimler planned to have a book coming out – Strawberry Fields Forever. In 2012, the book was paginated and ready to go to press. However, Arcadia Books went bankrupt, and the book remained unpublished. In 2011, José Lima translated the novel into European Portuguese. In a translator’s note, Lima discusses his translation as a form of ‘consented betrayal’. Using the resources of Portuguese, the translated text creates a surplus of meaning(s) dependent on the target language and experience. Although hardly new, the surplus results, in this case, from a phenomenon of “overtranslatability”. This publishing history has been further compounded by the fact that the translated text was exported to Brazil, after being “translated” into Brazilian Portuguese. I would like to address the different forms of migration that this translation brings to the fore: (1) migration as story; (2) migration as form; (3) translation as transit; (4) text migration as a challenge to traditional concepts – as the “original” has never been published, the translations are the only extant texts.
- Tradução como hospitalidade: notas incompletas para uma (po)ética do traduzirPublication . Lopes, AlexandraEste texto procura refletir sobre uma ideia de tradução que se assume como uma geografia de acolhimento, um lugar inclusivo em que recebemos o outro, que é necessariamente diferente do “nós” que traduz. Aplicando a reflexão à Europa, o artigo defende, especulativamente, a tradução como gesto relacional, em que, reconhecendo os nossos outros como iguais, nos (re)conhecemos neles.
- The ghost of a chance? Thinking colours across languages and culturesPublication . Lopes, AlexandraIn 1810, Johann Wolfgang Goethe suggested in Zur Farbenlehre that colour is a phenomenon diffi cult to categorise, resulting as it does from physiology, physics and perception. The fact that colour seems to be experiential to a large extent posits an interesting (and challenging) problem to literary works focussing on it. In this article, I argue that this issue is translational in nature and takes shape at two levels: fi rst, at the level of its representation in literary works — how does one translate a visual experience into words? —, and secondly at the level of its re-representation in translated literary works — how does one translate what is essentially an already-translated visual experience? Whenever colour is semantically and morphologically constitutive of meaning in literature, untranslatability haunts the text. However, publishers and translators rarely shrink from the task of translating on this account. This stake against probability is well worth looking into, as it may uncover a wealth of creativity and a resistance to the understanding of art as solipsism. In this article, Paul Auster’s ‘Ghosts’, part of his New York Trilogy, will be read as a text suggesting a culture-bound hermeneutics of colour, and as such probably untranslatable. I discuss the possible paradox of this degree of untranslatability against the text’s actual ‘translatedness’ by examining the two existing translations into European Portuguese.