Abstract
Myth is of interest to translation because these age old stories continue to exert a hold over us in how we represent, retell, and crucially also translate. They have colonized the unconscious of cultural production, just as much as patriarchy has. Thus, for instance, when Medea is mentioned, we have a particular image of her: she is our most famous child-killer, a history which has made it virtually impossible (at least after Euripides’ version of Medea), to give a girl the name Medea. And, when Medea is translated, the translator too holds a particular image of her: she is a woman and a foreigner, but she is also the dangerous “other” and the demonized stranger. This paper seeks to expose these mythic foundations that make particular versions, especially contradictory ones, possible, but that also offer a model that makes imperative their continual retelling and retranslation.
Biography
Karin Littau is Director of Research in the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies at University of Essex. She has published widely on translation, rewriting, and adaptation; and is especially interested in the intermedial relations between literature and film, and the historical receptions of print and new media. She is the author of Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies and Bibliomania (2006), The Routledge Concise History of Literature and Film (forthcoming), and co-editor of several edited collections, including A Companion to Translation Studies (with Piotr Kuhiwczak 2007).