The newest issue of Absinthe: World Literature in Translation is here! Volume 25, Barings // Bearings: Contemporary Women’s Writing in Catalan, is now available for order!

Edited by Megan Berkobien and María Cristina Hall, Barings // Bearings collects sixteen pieces of contemporary women’s writing in Catalan together with the brilliantly understated illustrations of the artist Elisa Monsó.

This special issue of Absinthe witnesses a living, Catalan language through the emotional labor of translation. It is also a testament to the thriving worlds of women’s writing in Catalan, with time-travelling fiction by Bel Olid (tr. Bethan Cunningham), regrets on pregnancy sublimated into an airborne taxi ride in a story by Tina Vallès (tr. Jennifer Arnold), Mireia Vidal-Conte’s poetry reflecting on Virginia Woolf’s suicide (tr. María Cristina Hall), a story of revenge on an abusive elderly woman by Anna Maria Villalonga (tr. Natasha Tanna), as well as reflections on war, bookstores, and generational conflict in post-Franco Spain. These often surreal pieces of Catalan fiction are informed by several essays and works of literary memoir, including those by Marta Rojals (tr. Alicia Meier) on the state of the Catalan language and Najat El Hachmi (tr. Julia Sanches) on the conditions of growing up in Catalonia as the daughter of Moroccan parents. These latter pieces resist and explore the contours of multilingualism, highlighting the intra- and interlingual reality of spoken Catalan alongside Spanish and Amazigh. Barings // Bearings invokes the feeling of a people through the work of a new generation of translators.

Read the full issue online first. Copies can be purchased through our website or Amazon.

Two winners were selected for the 2019 Senior Prize in Literary Translation.

Nevin Mital translated an Illustrated Children’s Mahabharata by Ramanlal Soni from Hindi into English.

Collin Parks translated The History by Michael Attaleiates from Ancient Greek into English.

Congratulations to the winners and thank you to all of the seniors who submitted their translation to the contest this year.

Thank you to all of the students who submitted a translation to the 18th annual Contexts for Classics Classical Translations Contest. Four graduate students and one undergraduate student were awarded prizes for their translations. Congratulations!

• Shannon Burton, Classical Archaeology major
• Anna Cornel, Classical Studies PhD student
• Lisa Levin, Comparative Literature PhD student
• Robert Santucci, Classical Studies PhD student
• Megan Wilson, Classical Studies PhD student

Canon is an online literary magazine dedicated to promoting and publishing undergraduate and graduate translation at the University of Michigan. Three undergraduate students minoring in translation undertook the task of creating a new website for Canon as well as editing the latest edition of the magazine. Congratulations to the editors, AJ Arons, Hannah Craig, and Alycia Bird, on the beautiful new site!   Read Canon Translation Journal! 

Dr. Yasmin Moll,  Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, is the winner of the 2019 Martha Cheung Award for Best English Article in Translation Studies by an Early Career Scholar for her article entitled ‘Subtitling Islam: Translation, Mediation, Critique’, published in Public Culture 29/2 (2017).

Dr. Moll’s study examines subtitling practices at Iqraa, a satellite television channel designed to promote Islamic da’wa (‘outreach’ or ‘preaching’) within both Muslim-majority and Muslim-minority societies. It argues that the subtitlers see their task as twofold: to act as ‘cultural mediators’ responsible for countering perceived Western stereotypes about Muslims on the one hand, and, on the other, to transmit as ‘preachers by proxy’ correct and relevant religious knowledge to viewers when, at times, the Arab preachers they subtitle fail to do so. These translators feel authorized to contest through subtitles both external representations of Islam and internal interpretations of divine intent. Their acts of translation, and their internal debate at Iqraa, exceed the familiar Euro-American antimony of fidelity and betrayal. The article is based on extensive fieldwork and draws on and contributes to scholarship in media studies, translation studies and cultural anthropology. It demonstrates a fine-grained attention both to the actual and contingent ways in which subtitles are created and to the different motivations behind their creation, showing how translation on Islamic television is entwined in multiple stakes at multiple scales, whether those are aspirations for professional excellence, desires for a more just geopolitical order, or longing for divine salvation.

Available open access for one year at https://read.dukeupress.edu/public-culture/article/29/2%20(82)/333/31094/Subtitling-Islam-Translation-Mediation-Critique