Nabokov’s Idioms: Translating Foreignness

Nabokov’s Idioms: Translating Foreignness

Conveners: Sara Pankenier Weld and Sven Spieker (Germanic & Slavic Studies, UCSB)
Friday, February 19, 2016 / 8:30 AM – 5:00 PM
University Center, Flying A Studios Room

This one-day symposium will investigate Nabokov’s writerly practice as a broadly conceived effort of translation. An émigré writer whose works were translated into many languages, Nabokov was himself a notorious translator. Yet translation, in his work, is much more than the mere transposition of a literary text from one language into another – it is a creative principle. In this symposium we propose to investigate what we see as Nabokov’s translational poetics – a comprehensive effort to relate to foreignness and the ‘Other’ that is, as such, also a powerful contribution to literary modernism, its media, and its critique.

Speakers include Julia Bekman Chadaga (Macalester College), Yuri Leving (Dalhousie University), Didier Maleuvre (UCSB), R. Dyche Mullins (UCSF), Galina Rylkova (University of Florida, Gainesville), Julia Trubikhina (Hunter College, CUNY), Lisa Ryoko Wakamiya and Robert Romanchuk (Florida State University), and Sara Pankenier Weld (UCSB). The symposium is held in honor of professor emeritus Don Barton Johnson in recognition of his extensive contributions to the field of Nabokov studies.

Website: http://www.gss.ucsb.edu/nabokov/home

Sponsored by the College of Letters and Science, Department of Germanic & Slavic Studies, Comparative Literature Program, Graduate Center for Literary Research, Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, Department of English, College of Creative Studies, Department of French & Italian, Spanish & Portuguese, Department of Linguistics, and Translation Studies.