Showing papers in "Coolabah in 2021"

On Utopus’ uterus: The colonisation of the body and the birth of patriarchal utopia in Thomas More’s Utopia

Abstract: Following European exploration of the Atlantic, origin myths could now be projected onto a possible future and ‘undiscovered’ lands. Often the island proved the most suitable design for these projections to ensure the ‘perfection’ of the community and avoidance of corruptive external influences. These novel conceptualisations envisaged new social constructs to explain human nature, however, they continued to be overtly patriarchal. Gender essentialism and colonisation of the female body was an integral part of reproducing traditional utopian imaginings. Thomas More’s Utopia exemplifies this archetypal gendered conceptualisation of the ideal island society where female education serves to reinforce patriarchal structures and women are essentialised in terms of their fertility. This paper addresses the relationship between the geography of Utopia and the insularity and confinement of women as dominated ‘matrixial entities’ which is further reinforced by utopian cartography. In this context, I assert that the process of colonisation and islanding unsettles the immutability of these patriarchal constructs and exposes the dystopian origins of Utopia.

Early Modern utopian islands: restoring a damaged Garden.

Abstract: Interest in islands grew rapidly during the Early Modern period as many explorers, merchants, monarchs and political commentators perceived islands as earthly paradises or magical loci of extreme riches. This paper presents an alternative strand of the period's ‘islomania’, where the newly discovered islands were imagined as loci of wilderness: empty lands that human ingenuity and hard work could be ‘improved’ into a utopia. Triumphal narratives of conquering nature were based on the newfound optimism inspired by fifteenth century humanism and the tenets of Early Modern natural philosophy. However, processes of ‘improvement’ cannot be thought of as apolitical or dislocated as they are often embedded in the colonialist narratives of the time. By examining a series of imaginary ‘utopian’ islands of the Early Modern period, including Utopia, New Atlantis, The Isle of Pines and the island of Robinson Crusoe, this paper dismantles binary conceptions of Early Modern mythical islands as paradise/hell, utopia/dystopia to a more nuanced understanding of how these writers utilised and depicted ‘utopia’ to reflect political, religious and social mores of the time.

The Uncanny Pleasures of Autotranslation

Abstract: If, as Walter Benjamin suggests, a translation must 'lovingly and in detail incorporate the original's mode of signification', translating is an act of creation predicated upon transference – a rewriting that entails a relationship with the other. This is in accordance with Benjamin's proposition that the translator must allow her language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue. But what if the foreign tongue is one’s mother tongue? This performative paper explores what is at stake in the act of autotranslation when a writer returns to her mother tongue. I will use my own practice to identify what is recovered in this act, namely, a voice, a word, a letter threaded through the fabric of language. I ask why this act produces a linguistic and subjective destabilisation that opens up translinguistic play and suggest that autotranslation consists of a creation in each language with its own interferences, rhythms and affects. Though the theoretical frame of my investigation touches upon linguistic and translation studies, this paper is essentially underpinned by psychoanalytic concepts and concerns itself with experiential knowledge.

Piffling: Differential Geography, Islandness and a Fictional Channel Island

Abstract: Wooden Overcoats is an independent comedy fiction podcast from 2015 about rival funeral homes set on the fictional island of Piffling. Study of the podcast offers a window into contemporary fictional Channel Island representation, a critique of which can help in comprehending the space and place of islands in literary studies more broadly. This article explores Wooden Overcoats in terms of small island representation (i.e., islandness) and how this contributes to discourse in the field of Island Studies. Focus is given to the ideas of differential geography, islandness and a fictional Channel Island. The podcast’s metaphorical language is deconstructed within a dialectics of space and place in order to foreground signifiers of cultural meaning that can help uncover meaning about the ontology of islands and the epistemology of islandness. Contrary to the cliche of social island insularity, Wooden Overcoats presents Piffling’s islanders as mostly open-minded and welcoming of outsiders. However, while the idea of ‘converse parody’ offers a surface-level depiction of islandness, this method of representation actually helps to reinforce the stereotype it’s aiming to counter. Whether remote, hostile or paradisiacal, islands have a character that can capture the creative imagination. Such inventiveness is played out in Wooden Overcoats in two main ways: (i) the island of Piffling is presented as central to the storyline, which portrays the lives of its islanders; and (ii) the social dynamics of Piffling are presented as a converse island parody in that the story portrays islanders in ways that refute stereotypical depictions that are typical in everyday discourse about island society.

Translating Trakl: James McAuley’s Encounter with the Cultural Other

Abstract: Translation theorist Laurence Venuti has written how a translator, in “a Romantic transcendence” can lose “his national self through a strong identification with a cultural other.” TS Reader, 20) Australian twentieth-century poet James McAuley’s reading and translation of the early twentieth-century Austrian poet Georg Trakl presents a significant literary encounter. Cosmopolitan by nature, McAuley, as a young poet, had been drawn to, and translated, the German language lyric poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926). Few of McAuley’s translations of Trakl are included in his Collected Poems(1971 and 1994); they appear in a separate posthumous collection (1982) and in his essay “The Poetry of Georg Trakl” (1975). This article offers a literary appreciation of McAuley’s translations and his commentary on Trakl’s imagery, prosody, symbolism and world view which McAuley described, borrowing Baudelaire’s term, as “a landscape of the soul.” It considers the hypothesis of translation as travel. Drawing on Harold Bloom’s theory of influence it examines McAuley’s encounter with Trakl in his late work, translations and poetic dedication (“Trakl: Salzburg,” 1976) written after visiting Salzburg in 1973. A comparatist approach traces Trakl’s influence, the discovery of affinities or parallel paths with the earlier poet who might be considered, in Bloomian terms, to be McAuley’s “gnostic double.”

Enigma of the Dark: Reflections while Researching Journalism and the Claremont Serial Killings

Abstract: After almost 25 years of mass media coverage on the Claremont Serial Killings, Perth audiences were informed in December 2020 that Bradley Robert Edwards would serve two life sentences for murdering two of the young women. This article draws on interviews with journalists to discuss media practices in the case that shocked Perth while shaping audience understandings of women as victims. The article describes how the term ‘serial killer’ came into use to bolster the importance of Western Australian news; how the status and resources of victim’s family influenced media coverage and, consequently, the police investigation; and, how the position of a journalist as an unbiased observer became untenable in the case.

Poetry co-translation and an attentive cosmopolitanism: internationalising contemporary Japanese poetry

Abstract: The majority of Japanese poetry currently reaches a limited readership outside of Japan. As a result, many contemporary Japanese poets are searching for ways to have their poems translated into English and published in English-language journals. Achieving satisfactory translation results, however, is considerably more complicated than switching words from one language into another and scholarship on the subject of translating Japanese poetry is often vexed. This scholarship frequently traverses much of the same ground as the debate about Japanese prose translation where, depending on their approach, translators may be labelled ‘literalists’ or ‘libertines’. This paper argues that co-translating Japanese poetry may be as much about sharing ideas and ideologies as about lineation, cadence or word choice. Co-translating Japanese poetry has the power to build cross-cultural understandings and to explore and promote ways of understanding Japanese identity. We argue that while translation is often undertaken by the translators in their country of residence, the experience of genius loci and undertaking co-translation in situ may best accommodate such a cross-cultural synergy.This paper draws on our collective experiences in a series of translation workshops at Meiji University. These were organised by Rina Kikuchi, a literary scholar and translator from Japan. Among other Australian poets and scholars, Paul Hetherington and Cassandra Atherton were paired with Japanese poets for co-translation purposes. They co-translated Japanese poetry into English and had their own poems translated into Japanese with the assistance of Kikuchi who acted as the lynchpin for the workshops. The experience was celebrated in a series of poetry readings in Tokyo and Nara. Significantly, although neither Hetherington nor Atherton is fluent in Japanese, they found the process of co-translation to include what one may call an attentive cosmopolitanism, incorporating respect and understanding for different cultural assumptions and poetic ideas.

Multilingual negotiations: the place and significance of translation in multilingual poetry

Abstract: Multilingual poetry, which weaves together multiple languages, necessarily straddles multiple cultural contexts. This raises the question of how poets who write multilingually negotiate and deploy their cultural knowledges, who they write for, and how their audiences receive them. Using Suresh Canagarajah’s Negotiation Model to examine poets’ linguistic choices, including whether and when to provide translations, and Mendieta-Lombardo and Cintron’s adaptation of the Myers-Scotton Markedness Model to consider audience and context, this paper will examine examples of contemporary bilingual and multilingual poetry published in Australia and Canada to identify the many conversations and negotiations that must take place between language-cultures as well as between multilingual poets and audiences for these poems to ‘work’.

An Introduction to Coolabah’s Special Issue on Mythical and Fictional Islands

Abstract: This special issue of Coolabah features a series of papers that explore how islands are imagined and articulated outside the geographical and biological parameters of reality. It is hoped this special thematic issue of Coolabah will introduce Island Studies to a new audience of interdisciplinary scholars and in doing so will encourage new debates and/or viewpoints to engage with the field of island research.

Crime, punishment, and death: Reading finitude and the self in David Malouf’s ‘The Conversations at Curlow Creek’

Abstract: The present paper reads David Malouf’s 1996 novel The Conversations at Curlow Creek as portraying a vivid and realistic picture of events relating to crime and punishment in colonial Australia in the early nineteenth century. The depiction of death penalty accorded to the bushranger Daniel Carney under the supervision of the Irish sheriff Michael Adair in New South Wales thus resonates with numerous historical accounts of incidents that actually happened. The novel, however, does more than only provide accurate historical representation as it also presents Adair as having undergone a rather dramatic transformation in the process of conversing with Carney before the latter’s execution. The paper, drawing on the views of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, argues that a realization of inevitable mortality, of facing certain death characterizes this change in Adair’s nature and worldview. It concludes by suggesting that Adair’s acceptance of his finitude intimates of a way of being in the world that not only subverts procedures of administering punishment to convicts in colonial Australia but also indicates the limits of polarized identity politics that shapes the country in the present times.

Accompanying a drunk man from “coupin’ gless for gless” to silence – An es-say in translating Hugh MacDiarmid

Abstract: This essay explores possibilities for translating the Scots language poetry of 20th cenury poet, Hugh MacDiarmid. Mirroring MacDiarmid’s propensity to draw on and recontextualise other sources of poetry and to create new poetic language, the essay illustrates options of translation as (i) repurposing the ideas of the poem, and (ii) reworking events associated with the poem. Two examples are contextualised in an overview of MacDiarmid’s prolific and intellectual Scots and English language poetry. MacDiarmid drew on both languages to create what he called synthetic Scots and synthetic English. This allowed him to explore Scottish cultural, social and political identity, in part to promote Scottish independence and autonomy, and in part to stimulate a new Scottish intellectual and literary tradition. His work typified what is known as Caledonian antisyzygy. Antisyzygy allows for borrowing, appropriation, reworking and decontextualisation of language, ideas and other writers’ work. The essay describes my own appropriation of one poem, On a Raised Beach, to inform a discussion of future education (translation as repurposing). It closes on a contemporary retelling of the construction of the book-length poem, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (translation as reworking).

Translating the ‘Still’ and the ‘Silent’: Stephen Poliakoff’s Shooting the Past

Abstract: In this montage-essay I want to explore the co-being of two forms of visuality in contemporary culture: the photographic and the cinematographic. But this is not my main concern. The more important thing for me is to unravel the notion of translation as movement between them. For this purpose, I’ll focus on Stephen Poliakoff’s movie Shooting the Past[1]. I’ll also show that a similar translation/movement takes place in various sections of the text that makes this essay. I will examine translation, as an act/event, at three different but inter-related levels: at the level of the film, that is, within the cinematic narrative; at the level of this essay, that is, in the process of writing and reading this essay; and at the most general level, the level of signification.[1] British playwright and film director Stephen Poliakoff has so often used photographic images in his well-known television serials and films that it is described as a trademark of his style. They appear in films such as, The Tribe (1998), Perfect Strangers (2001), The Lost Prince (2003). For a comprehensive study of his work see, Nelson, Robin. Stephen Poliakoff on Stage and Screen, (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, Methuen Drama imprint, 2011).

“A place of inexhaustible mysteries”: The modern legendry of Skull Island in the King Kong films and related media texts

Abstract: The 1933 film King Kong established its giant ape as an enduring cultural figure. It also introduced the public to a strange tropical island where prehistoric animals existed alongside a giant primate and a small human community sheltering behind a wall on a tiny peninsula. During the 20th century the island was essentially a sub-feature within a number of King Kong-themed films and, indeed, was referred to under various names. In recent decades, this position has shifted. De Vito’s 2004 illustrated novel, Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake of the original film and associated print and video texts, have significantly enhanced the island’s profile, establishing it definitively as ‘Skull Island’, and have provided contextual rationales for its geology, biology and society. These, in turn, spurred the production of related texts that have embroidered Skull Island into popular culture as an entity in its own right. Most recently, the 2017 remake, Kong: Skull Island, has offered a significant re-imagining that reinstates elements of texts that preceded and influenced the imagination of the original 1933 film. This article charts the shifts in representation of the island, the geo-cultural imaginaries played out in its representation and the concepts of islandness and island biogeography involved.

Translating alienation – between escapism and adventure

Abstract: The poems translated have been selected from Vasile Baghiu’s debut poetry collection The taste of alienation. Published in 1994, the collection represents the genesis of Baghiu’s story of poetic chimerism that spans three decades and eight volumes of poems. But the first chimeric ideas materialised, quietly, six years before The taste of alienation saw the light of day, at the height of the totalitarian regime in his native Romania. At the time, the poet was working as a nurse in a tuberculosis sanatorium, consumed by a sense of isolation in the depths of which he had a life-altering, liberating epiphany that shaped his identity and his understanding of the world. He realised that he could be someone else, that he could escape the personal, geographical and intellectual constraints imposed by the regime, and could virtually live a parallel life. And so poetic chimerism was born, as a means of evading ‘les maux de la societe’, as a form of personal freedom made possible through imagination and the re-creation, in writing, of imaginary travels through space and time.

Shimaumi: Aquapelagic imagery and poetics of ‘island-laying’ in Kojiki

Abstract: Kojiki, one of the oldest surviving records of Japanese history and mythology compiled in 712 CE, tells of the origin of the Japanese archipelago and nation. The initial chapter is known as shimaumi, or ‘island-laying’, where the birth of gods also gives rise to the formation of Japanese islands. This paper considers two aspects of shimaumi, firstly the spatiality of the myth and how aquapelagic imagery occurs both within shima (a locus of livelihood) and within the choice of kanji. Secondly, this paper considers how the aquapelagic imagery of shimaumi can be characterised as territorializing the sacred through ‘island-naming as a god’. Additionally, while Kojiki is mostly written in classical Chinese, some Japanese words and phrases are used for island names, onomatopoeia, mystical words and transliterated poetry within Chinese syntax. Performance, particularly of these Japanese elements, means that Kojiki can be viewed as an act of totohogi; a rejuvenation of the world in Japanese cosmology that is as individual as each re-telling.

On Crossing Barriers: Contemporary Caribbean Women Poets in Translation

Abstract: As Luise von Flotow already emphasized more than two decades ago in her work Translation and Gender: Translating in the ‘Era of Feminism’ (1997), often times feminist translators try to assume the responsibility of offering a critical reflection to their readers about their process, diverse methods and philosophies of translation. From our stance as feminist translators, we offer here a critical reflection on the process of collectively translating the bilingual anthology of poetry The Sea Needs No Ornament/ El mar no necesita ornamento (2020), accompanied by a sample of four poems by four of the thirty-three contemporary Caribbean women poets included. In this way, this paper contextualizes and offers a glimpse into the bilingual anthology of contemporary Caribbean women poets we have edited and translated from a feminist as well as a postcolonial perspective.

Ghosting in the outback Noir

Abstract: Who was the ‘jolly swagman’ in Waltzing Matilda, Australia’s unofficial national anthem? In this essay I argue that the ghost of the swagman can be heard in a number of recent de-colonising crime narratives. Outback Noir is a relatively recent genre category that describes a new wave of Australian crime films that highlight Indigenous and white relations and take a revisionist approach to traditional history. These films often feature redemption stories that highlight effective collaborations between Indigenous and white policing practices. Uncovering a rural communities’ dark, repressed secrets in order to solve a current problem is a common trend in Outback Noir cinema. I examine Patrick Hughes’ 2010 film Red Hill as an early provocative example of Outback Noir and as modern reimaging of the Waltzing Matilda narrative with the swagman’s avenging ghost exposing the social fractures and corruption that are destroying rural communities. I argue that the Outback Noir genre with its focus on revenge-redemption narratives shapes the cultural dialogue around putting the ghosts of the colonial past to rest.