Many studies have been devoted to translation studies in the last few decades. Still, none has yet focused on the role played by literary translations within the socialist bloc and how the translation of literature became a political and ideological instrument to advance the formation of the socialist society. Our symposium would help to rectify this situation. This will be the first major international symposium to solely focus on the literary translations made in socialist countries (both in Eastern Europe and Latin America) from 1959-1990. We have limited our period to these years because of the 1959 triumph of the Cuban Revolution, its immediate alignment with the socialist bloc, and the end of the Eastern bloc in 1990. The Cuban Revolution significantly impacted the Hispanic studies within the socialist bloc: most of the socialist countries saw a development in the field after this date. Many students were sent to Cuba to study Spanish, and many Cubans were sent to the socialist bloc to learn the culture and languages of the new allies.
Our symposium has three specific goals:
- It will bring together fourteen leading scholars working on translation studies related to former socialist countries from all over the globe: Europe, Latin America, and the United States.
- It will involve an extensive workshop to facilitate the development of new scholarly narratives by incorporating the contributions already made in this area of study. In this sense, our work will expand the field of translation studies by offering a unique perspective on how socialist countries created a parallel flow of literary production that somehow challenged the idea of world literature.
- This symposium will allow us to smooth the path for publishing a multi-authored book on this topic.
The diverse pool of scholars working together in this project will facilitate access to innovative knowledge of how socialist translations played a role in different former socialist countries during our study period. As a group, we will provide a unique perspective on the topic based on a profound individual knowledge of the context and the languages of different former socialist countries.
Our symposium reflects a significant scholarly shift in translation studies. Many recent studies have focused on the dangers of assimilating foreign cultures through translation. However, we will investigate the relationships that arise when the first language and the target language are intertwined due to geopolitical interests. Thus, we will focus our discussions on the socialist literature in translation that circulated in countries of the socialist bloc from the 1960s to the 1990s. Our ultimate goal is to establish the ‘geopolitics of translation’ involved in these processes.
To have the most significant possible impact on teaching and research in the history of socialist literary translations, we will create a digital archive to house and disseminate the information generated during the symposium. At the same time, we expect that one of the main results of our event will be the production of an edited volume whose chapters will originate from the discussions and feedback during the symposium.
The symposium will be held at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, the United States. It will be structured into panels divided by topics and will end with a general workshop to summarize our findings and propose ways to spread the result of our work (see attached proposed symposium program). This will allow us to review more in detail the topics, methods, and structure of a publication.
Students will co-moderate the panels with invited professors from other universities, departments, and programs, and they will present their own research works. They will also have a fundamental role in organizing the symposium and coordinating all the arrangements.