Panel: Cultural Crossings
Copanelists: Joseph Hogan, Rebecca Hogan, and Nadia Inserra
Otsekui tōlkes. Teema variatsioonidega (2004) is one of several autobiographical self-representations of the exiled Estonian writer and concert pianist Käbi Laretei. Originally published in Swedish (Såsom i en översättning. Teman med variationer), the language of the country where the author has lived since her forced emigration from Estonia during the Second World War, the title of the book in English translation would read As if in Translation. A Theme with Variations. While all Käbi Laretei’s self-representational narratives make visible the emergence of her textual subjectivity in the both fluid and rigid spaces in-between cultures and languages, always fluctuating between the two axes of speech and sound, As if in Translation makes this indeterminacy a central focus, addressing it via a narrative that is at the same time also a self-conscious conceptualization of her life as a process and procedure of being translated, and of “being in translation” as the only possible mode of being and representation. The objective of my paper is to discuss, with the help of Käbi Laretei’s As if in Translation as well as her other life-writing texts, the characteristic features of the processes of construction of subjectivity that are founded on (un)translatability, in particular its inherent paradox: the author’s situation (in de Beauvoirean sense) that is, on the one hand, limited by the all encompassing demand for (or domination of) translation, and on the other, viewable as le projet originel due to its translational dimension.
Leena Kurvet-Käosaar is Associate Professor of English at Tallinn University. She has an MA in Comparative Literature from Indiana University (1997), and a PhD in Comparative Literature from Tartu University (2006). She has published on women’s autobiographical writings, and in particular on women writers’ diaries from the first half of the twentieth century and the body, as well as on life writings, including personal narratives and autobiographical novels, by Baltic women concerning World War II and its aftermath in the Baltic States. She is the author, among other works, of Embodied Subjectivity in the Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Aino Kallas and Anais Nin (Tartu UP, 2006) and the article “Imagining a hospitable community in the deportation and emigration narratives of Baltic women” in Women’s Life-Writing and Imagined Communities (Ed. Cynthia Huff; Routledge, 2005). Her current research projects include further research into the life writings of Baltic women, especially within the framework of trauma studies, and leading the four-year Estoinian Science Foundation research project “Positioning Life Writing on Estonian Literary Landscapes.”