题目：Translation, Intertextuality, Interpretation
演讲人：Lawrence Venuti Professor of English at Temple University（ 著名翻译理论家和历史学家）
时间：2013年5月27日（星期一）晚7：00–9：00
地点：清华大学文南楼116会议室
主办：清华大学外国语言文学系、清华大学比较文学与文化研究中心
演讲者及讲座简介：Lawrence Venuti, Professor of English at Temple University, is a translation theorist and historian as well as a translator from Italian, French, and Catalan. He is the author ofThe Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation(2nd ed., 2008),The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference (1998), andTranslation Changes Everything: Theory and Practice(2013). He is the editor of the anthology of essays,Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology(1992), and ofThe Translation Studies Reader (3rd ed., 2012), a survey of translation theory from antiquity to the present. His translations include Antonia Pozzi’sBreath: Poems and Letters(2002), the anthology Italy:A Traveler’s Literary Companion(2003), Massimo Carlotto’s crime novel,The Goodbye Kiss (2006), and I.U. Tarchetti’s Gothic romance,Fosca(2009). His translation projects have won awards from the PEN American Center (1980), the National Endowment for the Arts (1983, 1999), the National Endowment for the Humanities (1989), and the Guggenheim Foundation (2007). In 1999 he held a Fulbright Senior Lectureship in translation studies at the Universitat de Vic (Spain). In 2008 his version of Catalan poet Ernest Farrés’s book,Edward Hopper, received the Robert Fagles Translation Prize.
Intertextuality is central to the production and reception of translations. Yet the possibility of translating most foreign intertexts with any completeness or precision is so limited as to be virtually nonexistent. As a result, they are usually replaced by analogous but ultimately different intertextual relations in the receiving language. The creation of a receiving intertext permits a translation to be read with comprehension by translating-language readers. It also results in a disjunction between the foreign and translated texts, a proliferation of linguistic and cultural differences that are at once interpretive and interrogative. Intertextuality enables and complicates translation, preventing it from being an untroubled communication and opening the translated text to interpretive possibilities that vary with cultural constituencies in the receiving situation. To activate these possibilities and at the same time improve the study and practice of translation, we must work to theorize the relative autonomy of the translated text and increase the self-consciousness of translators and readers of translations alike. To explore these ideas, three cases will be considered: Rossella Bernascone’s 1989 Italian version of David Mamet’s play Sexual Perversity in Chicago; Kate Soper’s 1976 English version of Sebastiano Timpanaro’s study,Il lapsus freudiano. Psicanalisi e critica testuale(The Freudian Slip); and my own 2004 English version of Melissa P.’s fictionalized memoir,100 colpi di spazzola prima di andare a dormire(100 Strokes of the Brush before Bed).
