Agnes Whitfield, a professor in the Department of English, reconnected with surrealism in the early 2020s when she started writing surrealist poetry herself. “The term has been trivialized and so many visual artworks manipulated in advertising that we forget that surrealism originated in the revolt and despair felt by young men and women after the carnage of World War I and how tremendously relevant the creative impulse at its source remains today,” says Whitfield.
Galvanized by André Breton’s famous 1924 manifesto, surrealism became a powerful aesthetic movement, crossing national and artistic boundaries and liberating new creative synergies. Despite its tremendous international reach, however, scholarship on how these unusual and provocative texts were translated from one language context to another is rare.
To fill this gap, Whitfield co-organized a two-day international conference held on Oct. 9-10, at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. The conference brought together scholars and translators from 13 universities in five countries and was attended by over 50 colleagues and students in person and another 30 online. “The papers highlighted not only how inventive translators of surrealist texts have been, but also how the questions about the nature of meaning these works raise can bring productive new perspectives to translation theory and teaching,” notes Whitfield.
This project was supported by the Sorbonne Nouvelle, the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies Research Events Fund and the VPRI Scholarly Events and Outreach Activities Fund. Whitfield is now co-editing a volume of articles on the topic for the Translation Studies journal Palimpsestes.