Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU invites you to a public lecture by Prof. Norbert Bachleitner:

 

Translation Studies and Book History Illustrated with German Translations of Scott and Flaubert.

 

The lecture in English language will be on Thursday, 20th of May 2021 at 11 a. m. via ZOOM (link, meeting ID: 869 7207 3300, passcode: 005101).

 

The systems approach of book history should be applied to the study of translations, because it sheds light on the agents who influence their genesis and distribution – such as mediators, translators, publishers, censors and readers. In the 1820s, which saw a significant increase in book production and translation, the translation of Walter Scott’s works was mainly carried out as ‘hackwork’ by ‘speculative’ publishers unhindered by international copyright protection. In Austria, translations of his work were censored in order to conform to religious and political standards. Despite such interventions, Scott quickly became a favourite of the German reading public, as reflected in unprecedented print runs. Flaubert shared a similar fate: integrated into a popular novel series, the first German translation of Madame Bovary abounds with traces of the translator’s self-censorship.

 

Norbert Bachleitner is a Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Vienna/Austria. He was visiting professor at various universities including the Sorbonne nouvelle in Paris and is a member of the Academia Europaea. His fields of interest include the reception of English and French literature in the German speaking area; literary translation and transfer studies; social history of literature; censorship; literature in periodicals; intertextuality, and digital literature. His most recent book publications are Die literarische Zensur in Österreich von 1751 bis 1848 (Wien, Köln, Weimar: Böhlau, 2017; English translation forthcoming) and (ed., together with Ina Hein, Karoly Kókai and Sandra Vlasta) Brüchige Texte, brüchige Identitäten. Avantgardistisches und exophones Schreiben von der klassischen Moderne bis zur Gegenwart (Göttingen: Vienna University Press, 2018), (ed., together with Achim Hölter and John A. McCarthy) Taking Stock – Twenty-Five Years of Comparative Literary Research (Leiden, Boston: Brill 2020) and (ed.) Literary Translation, Reception, and Transfer (Proceedings of the ICLA Conference in Vienna 2016, vol. 2, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter 2020).

 

Kindly invited!