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Translation and the Construction of Identity: Abstracts
Date: 12-14 August 2004
Venue: Sookmyung Women's University, Seoul, Korea
Eric Plourde The Kalevala is the Finnish national epic, written in
the 19th century by Elias Lšnnrot in the context of the emancipation of the
Finnish people. The epic has influenced the development of Finnish as a
literary language, and it is still today a landmark of Finnish literature.
Panel 5: Translation and the (De-)construction of National/Cultural Identities
Rewriting the Epic: Kalevala Translations as an Expression of
Nationalism in Linguistic Minorities
University of Montreal, Canada
So far, the translation of the Kalevala has been undertaken in about 50
languages. However, upon a closer look at these translations, several
questions arise. Why this particular interest in the Kalevala? How has it
happened that the Kalevala has been retranslated so many times? What can we
tell from the languages of translation, and from the translators themselves?
Examples of how translation serves as incentive for the emancipation of
minority languages can be observed in the translation of the Kalevala into
unofficial languages of the European states. Close inspection of the
timeline of Kalevala translations and even retranslations can give us a clue
of how cultures assert themselves in world literature: for example the
retranslation of the Kalevala into Chinese in 2000 was done directly from
Finnish instead of using an English translation as a starting point.
Translation of the Kalevala would thus occupy a position that parallels the
one taken by the translation of the Bible at the beginning of the
Renaissance period, when modern European nations were emerging.
© IATIS 2003