Literary Translation and Cultural Mediators in ’Peripheral’ Cultures

Diana Roig-Sanz is a Ramón y Cajal senior research fellow at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain, and a Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Internet Institute, at the University of Oxford, UK. Her research interests include cultural history and sociology of translation and digital humanities and big data approaches applied to the study of translation and cultural history.

Reine Meylaerts is Professor of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies at KU Leuven, Belgium, where she teaches European Literature, Comparative Literature and Translation and Plurilingualism in Literature. Her current research interests concern translation policy, intercultural mediation and transfer in multilingual cultures, past and present.

This book sets the grounds for a new approach exploring cultural mediators as key figures in literary and cultural history. It proposes an innovative conceptual and methodological understanding of the figure of the cultural mediator, defined as a cultural actor active across linguistic, cultural and geographical borders, occupying strategic positions within large networks and being the carrier of cultural transfer. Many studies on translation and cultural mediation privileged the major metropolis of Paris, London, and New York as centres of cultural production and translation. However, other cities and megacities that are not global centres of culture also feature vibrant translation scenes. This book abandons the focus on 'innovative' centres and 'imitative' peripheries and follows processes of cultural exchange as they develop. Thus, it analyses the role of cultural mediators as customs officers or smugglers (or both in different proportions) in so-called 'peripheral' cultures and offers insights into an under-analysed body of actors and institutions promoting intercultural transfer in often multilingual and less studied venues such as Trieste, Tel Aviv, Buenos Aires, Lima, Lahore, or Cape Town.

Questions Eurocentric dispositions and the traditional division between centre and periphery in cultural production

1.- General Introduction: Literary Translation and Cultural Mediators. Toward an Agent and Process-Oriented Approach.- 2. Early Institutionalised Promotion of Translation and the Socio-Biography of Emil Walter, Translator, Press Attaché and Diplomat.- 3. Edoardo Weiss, A Triestine Translating Freud.- 4. Spanish Discovers Yiddish: The Cultural Policies of Salomon Resnick in Argentina in the Interwar Period.- 5. Xiaoshuo yuebao (1921-1931) as a Cultural Mediator of Small Literatures in China.- 6. Mashal Books as Cultural Mediator: Translating East Asian, Middle Eastern, and African Literatures into Urdu in Lahore.- 7. Politics of Translation: How States Shape Cultural Transfers.- 8. From a Slave to a Translator: Conflicts and Mediation in Fatma-Zaïda's Translation of the Quran.- 9. Mediating Flemish Folk Songs Across Cultural Borders During the 19th century: From Patrimonial Monuments to Musical Propaganda.- 10. From Binarity to Complexity:a Latourian Perspective on Cultural Mediators. The Case of Georges Eekhoud's Intra-National Activities.- 11. Moving "Out of the Laager" and "Betraying the Tribe": André Brink as Cultural Mediator.- 12. "Let's Make Peru Peruvian Again:" Cultural Mediators and Indigenous Literature.