Special Forum in the Journal of Transnational American Studies
Global Huck: Mapping the Cultural Work of
Translations of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Editors: Shelley Fisher Fishkin (Stanford University, USA), Ronald Jenn (Université de Lille, France), Selina Lai-Henderson (Duke Kunshan University, China), Tsuyoshi Ishihara (University of Tokyo, Japan), Holger Kersten (University of Halle-Wittenberg, Germany)
Global Huck: This Special Forum will explore the cultural work done by translations of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn around the world. It will examine how a range of social, cultural, political, and historical contexts—as well as the agendas of translators and publishers and the expectations of readers—have shaped responses to the novel outside of the US from its publication to the present. As of 2019, the novel has been translated into at least sixty-three languages, with multiple editions in many languages.
Topics
We particularly welcome contributions in the following areas (but are open to many others):
§ How specific translations handle Twain’s social critique
§ What translators’ and editors’ omissions reveal about their social and political anxieties and blind spots
§ How translations intervene in cultural conversations about childhood, education, authority, race, slavery, morality, religion, language politics, dialect, etc., in various countries at various moments in time
§ Comparative discussions of the illustrations
§ How translators deal with offensive racial epithets
§ The influence of translations of Huckleberry Finn on later writers in particular countries
§ How translations shape attitudes about the US around the world
§ How Twain’s humor translates
§ Adaptations and uses of the novel in films, anime, music, advertising, popular culture, etc.
Essays may be comparative in nature, or may focus on a particular translation. We also welcome theoretical translation studies essays on transnational issues rooted in translations of Huckleberry Finn; and short essays by translators on the challenges of translating particular passages (such as Pap’s “Call this a govment” rant in Chapter 6 and Huck’s battle with his conscience ending with “All right then, I’ll go to hell!” in Chapter 31).
While we are open to studies of the racial politics of the novel in a broad range of global contexts, we particularly welcome investigations of this topic in
· the Afrikaans translation by famous anti-apartheid writer André Brink (Capetown. 1963)
· the Portuguese translation by celebrated São Tomé-born Afro-Portuguese poet José Tenreiro (Lisbon,1973
We also welcome examinations of the cultural politics of neglected translations including
· the Yiddish translation published in Kiev in 1929
· Vietnamese versions published in Hanoi and Saigon in the 1960s
· translations in languages of the former Soviet Union (Armenian, Kazakh, Kirghiz, Tatar, and Turkmen) and languages of the Baltic countries (Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian)
· translations into languages of the India sub-continent (Assamese, Bengali, Gujarat, Hindi, and Telugu)
Note: Editors may be able to help with locating particular translations. Just write to us to enquire. [[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>]
Proposals of up to 400 words should be sent to [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> along with a short bio of the author. We welcome traditional articles of 4,000 to 6,000 words or micro-essays of 1,200 words.
Timeline
Proposals are due by January 1st, 2020
Notification of acceptance by February 1st, 2020
Final essays due June 15th, 2020
Publication will be contingent on acceptance by peer-reviewers and the JTAS editorial board. Essays should be in English. They may include direct quotations in other languages alongside English translations of those quotations.
Background
The first book-length study of Mark Twain published anywhere came out in Paris in 1884, penned by French critic Henry Gauthier-Villard. Scholars who have examined Mark Twain’s international appeal include Archibald Henderson (1911), Roger Asselineau (1954), Howard Baetzhold (1970), Robert M. Rodney (1982), Carl Dolmetsch (1993), Holger Kersten (1993, 1999, 2005), Shelley Fisher Fishkin (1997, 2010, 2011, 2015, 2019), Raphaele Berthele (2000), Judith Lavoie (2002), Tsuyoshi Ishihara (2005), Ronald Jenn (2006), Selina Lai-Henderson (2015), and Paula Harrington and Ronald Jenn (2017).
Asselineau, Roger. The Literary Reputation of Mark Twain from 1910 to 1950: A Critical Essay and Bibliography. Paris: Librairie Marcel Didier, 1954.
Berthele, Raphaele. “Translating African-American Vernacular English into German: The Problem of ‘Jim’ in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 4, no. 4 (2000): 588–613.
Baetzhold, Howard G. Mark Twain and John Bull: The British Connection. Bloomington: University of Indiana University Press, 1970.
Dolmetsch, Carl. “Our Famous Guest”: Mark Twain in Vienna. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1993.
Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. “American Literature in Transnational Perspective: The Case of Mark Twain.” Blackwell Companion to American Literary Studies.” Edited by Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
———. “DEEP MAPS: A Brief for Digital Palimpsest Mapping Projects (DPMPs) or ‘Deep Maps.’” Journal of Transnational American Studies. 3:2.
Winter 2011. http://escholarship.org/uc/item/92v100t0<https://escholarship.org/uc/item/92v100t0>
———. Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
———. “‘Originally of Missouri, Now of the Universe’: Mark Twain and the World.” In Nadja Gernalzick and Heike C. Spickermann, eds. Developing Transnational American Studies. Heidelberg: Winter, 2019.
———. “Transnational Twain.” In American Studies as Transnational Practice, edited by
Donald Pease and Yuan Shu. University Press of New England, 2015.
Fishkin, Shelley Fisher, editor. The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on his Life and Works. New York: Library of America, 2010.
Gauthier-Villars, Henry. Mark Twain. Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1884.
Henderson, Archibald. Mark Twain. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1911.
Ishihara, Tsuyoshi. Mark Twain in Japan: The Cultural Reception of an American Icon. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2005.
Jenn, Ronald. “From American Frontier to European Borders: Publishing French Translations of Mark Twain’s Novels Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (1884–1963).” Book History 9 (2006): 235–60.
Jenn, Ronald, and Paula Harrington. Mark Twain and France: The Making of a New American Identity. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2017.
Kersten, Holger. “Mark Twain and Continental Europe.” In A Companion to Mark Twain, edited by Peter Messent and Louis J. Budd. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.
———. “‘Human Natur in a Forren Aspeck’: Mark Twain’s Encounters with German Culture.” Mark Twain Review (The Mark Twain Circle of Korea) 4 (1999): 47–72.
———. Von Hannibal nach Heidelberg: Mark Twain und die Deutschen. [From Hannibal to Heidelberg: Mark Twain and the Germans]. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1993.
Lai-Henderson, Selina. Mark Twain in China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015.
Lavoie, Judith. Mark Twain et la parole noir. Montréal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2001.
Rodney, Robert M., editor and compiler. Mark Twain International: A Bibliography and Interpretation of his Worldwide Popularity. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1982.
Journal: The Journal of Transnational American Studies<https://escholarship.org/uc/acgcc_jtas/aboutus> is a peer-reviewed, open-access online journal sponsored and Stanford University’s Program in American Studies<https://amstudies.stanford.edu/>, and UC Santa Barbara’s American Cultures and Global Contexts Center<http://acc.english.ucsb.edu/>and supported by the UC-Davis Department of American Studies<https://ams.ucdavis.edu/welcome> and Department of English<http://english.ucdavis.edu/>. Founded in 2009, JTAS is hosted on the eScholarship Repository of the California Digital Library.
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