A CAREER IN TRANSLATION

Based on a talk by Professor Susan Bassnett FRSL, Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies

In order to mark Professor Susan Bassnett's considerable contribution to the field of translation studies, the University of Warwick organised the Literature, Travel, Translation symposium, which tackled a variety of topics from translating Kipling to the seduction of 'elsewhere' in travel and utopian literature. Prof Bassnett herself presented a lecture entitled Reflections, in which she talked about her peripatetic childhood, her influences, and how she has always enjoyed pushing boundaries.

Listen to the full talk below:

Translation is a highly skilled activity; a translation can become a great work in the second language. Take Ezra Pound’s 1915 collection of poems, Cathay, an indirect translation from the Chinese. Because of the poems’ elegiac qualities, Cathay was read, not as a collection of Chinese translations, but as a commentary on World War I. Read in this different context, the poems acquired a different meaning.

During the Literature, Travel, Translation symposium at the University of Warwick, organised in her honour, Professor Susan Bassnett spoke of her love of translation studies and her ongoing commitment throughout her career to crossing boundaries. “Borders in comparative literature studies such as 'This is English literature, this is French literature' are nonsense,” she says. As is the idea that a work isn’t translation if the translator doesn’t have a perfect, absolute knowledge of both languages. “To my deep dismay this argument is still going on," she remarked.

Bassnett had a somewhat peripatetic childhood, with her schooling taking place in different countries. She was an English girl who spent her formative years living in Lisbon and then America. What she learned through moving around was to listen and to observe how people do things. As a small child she read comics sent from England in which the lives of women, including female novelists and travellers, were serialised. This taught her the importance of finding role models for women who are not pop stars.

Another founding influence was her Great Aunt who left Prof Bassnett her library. In it she discovered a love of Thomas Hardy and Browning, along with Russian and French writing. Her Great Aunt taught her to go on re-reading things in order to discover meanings that she had missed first or second time around.

A summary of the Literature, Travel, Translation symposium is now available.

Professor Susan Bassnett is one of the leading figures and founding scholars in translation studies. Her Translation Studies, first published in 1980, has remained consistently in print and is the world’s leading textbook on the subject.

She has published over 20 books on subjects that also include contemporary theatre, feminist thought, Shakespeare, and South American women writers.

Prof Bassnett began her academic career in Italy and moved via the USA to Warwick, where she also served with distinction as the University’s first female Pro Vice-Chancellor and as a member of the Council. At the end of 2010 she formally retired from the University.

By Penelope Jenkins