Channels of Communication
Asynchronous Session
Translating Occupation Chronicles: Translator’s Agency as Anti-propagandistic Stance in Stanislav Aseyev’s In Isolation
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Anna Antonova
In the environment of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war, translation of Ukrainian war-themed literature has become a critically relevant cultural practice meant to represent the nation’s identity, disseminate its narratives of resistance and resilience, and share its people’s lived experiences. This study engages with Lidia Wolanskyj’s translation of Stanislav Aseyev’s collection of documentary essays In Isolation: Dispatches from the Occupied Donbas (В ізоляції. Есеї про Донбас) to foreground how the translator’s visibility and textual interventions contextualize occupation narratives for Anglophone audiences and amplify the author’s pro-Ukrainian political perspective in opposition to Russia’s propagandistic ideology. Stanislav Aseyev, a Donetsk-born writer and journalist who personally witnessed Russia’s 2014 occupation of Donbas and experienced arrest, torture, and unlawful detention, in his essays documents the unravelling occupation and analyzes the shifts in local postcolonial mentality as an identity conflict between post-Soviet propaganda-instilled beliefs and the emerging Ukrainian national self-awareness. The English version’s translatorial interventions, including textual transformations (changed order of texts; added timelines) and paratextual elements (translator’s notes; captioned photos and maps) centre the translator’s/editors’ project on the goal of educating their target audiences and raising awareness of Russia’s military aggression and informational warfare. Undertaken in 2022 amid continuing full-scale invasion, this translating project acquires special significance as a way to broadcast Ukraine’s war narratives and dismantle harmful tropes of Russian propaganda. My analysis highlights how the translator’s self-positioning contributes to this objective, while raising important questions on the translating subject’s agency in giving voice to the silenced survivors.
From 'the Cradle of Civilization' to Ben Okri's Changing Destiny
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Rosemary Alice Gray
The paper begins with a brief discussion of ’the cradle of civilization’, and an outline of the BA-RA relationship, a pivotal concept that underpins both the generative poem and its migration into a play, seen through the prism of a 4000-year-old Egyptian poem, Sinuhe. This is followed by a summary of the 1875 BCE funerary autobiography. A comparison of the framing poem with Ben Okri’s drama, Changing Destiny, serves to explore the transfer and transformation of key ideas of what it means to be human and the nature of exile and homecoming. The discussion is bolstered by theories of hospitality encapsulated in Merle Williams’s 2020 Hospitalities: Transitions and Transgressions, North and South. I conclude by arguing that despite the four-century gap and the dearth of literary criticism, the ideas in the poem, transferred and transformed by Okri in his drama, resonate powerfully with our times.
