Attention: due to health concerns, Prof. Riitta Oittinen will not arrive in Poznań. Professor Anna Kérchy's lecture will take place as planned instead.
The Faculty of Polish and Classical Philology cordially invites you to a joint guest lecture given by Prof. Riitta Oittinen from the University of Tampere, Finland and Prof. Anna Kérchy from the University of Segedin, Hungary, which will be held on Wednesday, 15 November 2023, from 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m., in room 327 at Collegium Maius.
Prof Riitta Oittinen's speech entitled 'The Many Faces of Translation - The Many Faces of Alice' will focus on different types of translation, primarily the translation of children's picture books. Prof Oittinen shall also touch upon the verbal and visual aspects of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in translation. The image of the child created by the translator and the illustrator will be at the core of her talk, and she will describe some of her illustrations for Alice.
In her talk 'The (im)possibilities of translating literary nonsense: How to tame the Jabberwock?', Prof. Anna Kérchy will, in turn, tackle the topic of literary nonsense, commonly referred to as the 'holy grail of translation' (Heyman 2015). It is a 'cross-over genre' (Beckett 2008), defined by an ambiguous fusion of 'mature', philosophically self-reflexive, metalinguistic layers of meaning and the 'infantile' anarchic joy of transversal acoustic play. Such paradoxical hybridity - appearing in language games, logic puzzles, puns, neologisms and riddles - poses a real challenge to translators seeking to recreate in another language, culture or medium the perplexing yet humorous effects of the source text while remaining faithful to the original. As a case study, prof. Kérchy relocates Lewis Carroll's Victorian purnonsense fantasies of Alice's adventures in Wonderland and on the other side of the mirror, focusing on the heroic-comic ballad Jabberwocky for a threefold purpose: to reveal the ironic construction of the reader (both the implied reader and the actual child reader outside the pages of the book) as a translator in a vain search for 'meaningful' relevance, to present picture poems and illustrations as visual translations of verbal nonsense and at the same time precursor stories of transmedia, and to reflect on cultural transposition, linguistic transfer and creative domestication in Hungarian translations attempting to besmirch Carroll's monster.
The lecture will be held in English!
The event is organised as part of the University of Tomorrow programme by the Children's Literature and Culture Research Team at the Faculty of Polish and Classical Philology, the translation specialisation of IFP UAM, the "Translation" Scientific Circle of AMU and the Children's Art Circle "On the High Mountain" of the Faculty of Polish and Classical Philology.
Prof. Riitta Oittinen is a docent at the Finnish universities of Tampere and Helsinki. In addition to being an artist, she is also an active researcher with a track record that includes scholarly monographs, chapters in monographs, translations (especially of picturebooks), illustrations, animated films and exhibitions dedicated to, among others, her drawings for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll. Her publications include particularly I Am Me - I Am Other: On the Dialogics of Translating for Children (1993), Translating for Children (2000), Whose Story? Translating the Verbal and the Visual in Literature for Young Readers (2008), Translating Picturebooks. The Verbal, the Visual and the Aural for a Child Audience (2018), and the articles 'The Many Faces of Alice in Carnival: From Intersemiotic to Intervisual Translation' (2022) and 'Translating the Verbal and the Visual for a Child Image: Perspectives and Dialogues' (in print).
Prof. Anna Kérchy is a lecturer in English Literature at Segedin University in Hungary, where she heads the Doctoral Program in Literature and Cultures in English and the Gender Studies Research Group. She is also the founder of the Children's and Young Adult Literature and Culture Research Centre. Her interests include Victorian and postmodern fantasy imagination, literary nonsense, body studies, Humanism studies, posthumanism and transmedial adaptogenic properties, and the bodily narratological dimensions of children's and young adult literature. She is the author of the monograph Alice in Transmedia Wonderland, which won the HUSSE Book Award, Body-Texts in the Novels of Angela Carter and Poetics and Politics of Literary Nonsense (forthcoming), and co-editor of ten collective volumes, including Postmodern Reinterpretations of Fairy Tales; The Fairy-Tale Vanguard (Cambridge Scholars, with Stijn Praet, 2019); Transmediating and Translating Children's Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, with Björn Sundmark, 2020) and Jabberwocky in Translation (Evertype, with Björn Sundmark and Kit Kelen).