Translation futures: Shakespearians and the foreign text

Summary

At the 1994 meeting of the International Shakespeare Conference in Stratford, Inga-Stina Ewbank delivered an impressive plenary devoted to 'Shakespeare and Translation as Cultural Exchange'. In this path-finding address, Ewbank observed that despite the cultural turn in Shakespeare studies, research into Shakespeare in translation was still mainly the pursuit of non-English-natives. Drawing on the work of Dirk Delabastita and Lieven D'hulst, Ewbank noted that - at least as perceived from the English omphalos - the study of translations was really 'an interesting and harmless occupation for researchers abroad'. There was, she argued, still little 'reciprocity' between Translation Studies on the one hand and English and American Shakespeare Studies on the other. During the early 1990s, seminars on translation had indeed become an inalienable part of Shakespeare conferences, in Stratford and elsewhere, but the attendance rate by native speakers of English, she argued, remained negligible.

Since 'Exchange' was the conference theme in 1994, Inga-Stina Ewbank sought to free Shakespearian translation from its Cinderella status and achieve a new, more fully integrated form of exchange around the topic. In an attempt to bring both non-native and native speakers of English together around their world author, Ewbank first countered the still widely held assumption that translation merely involved a potential element of corruption. Translation should not be seen as 'a somewhat embarrassing form of inverse colonialism' either. In an attempt to change this prevailing hegemonic perception, Ewbank invited the conference to recognize first of all that, '[t]ranslation is never a purely philological activity but a collusive re-creation in which cultural differences cling to grammar and syntax and history mediates the effect even of single words'.