The present call for papers aims at exploring the reception of ancient Greek drama in translation practices and theories in the early modern period, in Europe, the colonial Americas and the Arab peninsula, between 1600 and 1800. Please send your abstract to translatinggreektragedy@gmail.com
This is the fourth event in a series spanning translation in the early modern period (see the 2020, 2019, and 2018 programmes). This year’s conference is organised by Giovanna Di Martino (UCL) and Cécile Dudouyt (Paris 13/USPN) and will take place at University College London on 24 June 2022. The conference is supported by University College London, the Centre for Early Modern Exchanges (UCL), Paris 13, and the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (Oxford).
The conference will also include the book launch of the volume largely coming out of the first two conferences and co-edited by Giovanna Di Martino, Cécile Dudouyt, Malika Bastin-Hammou, and Lucy Jackson, and titled Translating Ancient Greek Drama in Early Modern Europe: Theory and Practice 1450-1600 (De Gruyter).
CALL FOR PAPERS
Understanding early modern translation theories and practices relating to ancient Greek drama, its ancient and modern theorists, and its ties with early modern theatre practices and theories, is a cross-cultural, multilingual and collective effort. In the past three conferences held between Oxford and Paris, there has emerged the need for a distinction between translation and translating, where the former is often the work of a scholar and stands in the philological realm, whilst the latter can be found in texts that are not necessarily conceived of as ‘translations’ nor as explicitly drawing on ancient Greek material more generally. Both translation and translating of ancient Greek drama in this period should be understood as an interlinguistic and intersemiotic transaction that, in addition to involving two linguistic systems, also encompasses a reassessment of both the source’s and target’s contextual and cultural meanings as well as a recodification of the source’s cultural and theatrical conventions into new ones. The implications of such a recodification are brought to the fore when these texts are explored in their dramaturgical potentials; i.e. as translations of dramatic texts and thus (if only ideally) conceived for the stage – whichever ‘stage’ that might be –, but also as themselves dramaturgical acts of understanding and assembling meanings, ancient and modern alike, in a mutual relationship of influence.
This fourth conference in the series invites submissions which may include, but should not be limited to, the following topics:
· The presence of ‘translating’ ancient Greek drama in theatres and other forms of performance, whether courtly, commercial, academic, or private
· The translators’ own definition of their work and the circulation of their texts
· Translation and translating of ancient Greek drama and their contribution to, place within, the scholarly/philological realm
· Translation theories and their application to translation practices in performance
· Translation and translating and the construction or subversion of national dramatic repertoires and/or social practices
· Translation and translating and the superimposition/challenge/resignification of the cultural meanings of the source’s and target’s dramatic practices and local forms of theatre
· the dramaturgical potential of early modern translation and translating of ancient Greek drama, which can be presented in the form of demonstration-performance papers