Translation and/as empathy : mapping translation shifts in 9/11 fiction

• Main Author: Hemsworth, Kirsty
• Other Authors: McCallam, David ; Woodin, Jane
• Published: University of Sheffield 2017
• Online Access: https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.737883

This thesis seeks to establish an unprecedented empathic approach to the comparative analysis of 9/11 fiction in translation. The central tenet of this study is that translation – as a creative, subversive and disarming force – is a fundamentally empathic process. As parallel and reciprocal works of fiction, 9/11 novels and their translations are not only bound by the centrifugal force of the traumatic event at their centres, but perform, expand and subvert the same empathic structures and interactions on which they are founded. By foregrounding an innovative comparison of translation shifts, this thesis will map the potential for interactivity and reciprocity across the translation divide, and reinstate the translated text as a rich terrain for textual analysis. This thesis will focus on four key works of fiction and their French translations: Falling Man and L’homme qui tombe (Don DeLillo), The Submission and Un Concours de Circonstances (Amy Waldman), Terrorist and Terroriste (John Updike), and The Zero and Le Zéro (Jess Walter). This topographical overview of 9/11 fiction offers a deliberately fragmentary and episodic account of a genre that is unsettled in translation, with a view to capturing, and testing the limits of, the vast temporal, empathic and imaginative networks in which the texts and their translations participate. By drawing complex empathic maps of 9/11 fiction and their translations, this thesis will emphasise the value of translation shifts as an innovative and critical tool for literary analysis. It seeks to expand the limits of contemporary literary translation approaches to accommodate dynamic, empathic forms of analysis and textual modes of comparison, where both source and target texts are indivisible from the empathically-unsettled terrains in which they are forged.