exoticism in translation

Thus, the kind of world cinema under consideration here is also known as global art cinema and conceived with global cinephiles rather than local mainstream audiences in mind.1, This raises the question of how global art cinema squares the circle of conveying a sense of local authenticity (one of the main attractions world cinema holds in store) while being simultaneously intelligible and appealing across different cultures. Exoticism in Translation refers to using words and phrases which sound "exotic" in the translated language, because they are of a foreign origin. Entirely apart from the plot, there is the sensuous pleasure of the architecture, the fabrics, the color contrasts, the faces of the actresses.. https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/applied-and-social-sciences-magazines/exoticism, "Exoticism These features jointly contribute to the films impenetrability which, in turn, engenders a sense of enigma that amplifies its exotic allure by confirming the belief that the Other can never be fully fathomed. In: Sheldon, Hsiao-peng Lu, ed., Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender. xviixxii. Although this kind of cultural translation has, historically, been the domain of ethnography, it is by no means restricted to the scientific discourse on cultural difference. 618. 283 0 obj Although her martial arts skills are unsurpassed, on several occasions, her heart blocks her from completing her deadly assignments. It has been deeply entrenched in the European imaginary of the Orient ever since Pierre Loti conflated exoticism and eroticism and his immensely popular novel Madame Chrysanthme (1887) inspired Giacomo Puccinis opera Madama Butterfly (1904) and served as a template of Asian femininity in the popular imagination of the West (cf. De Luca, Tiago (2013). Nagib, Lcia, Chris, Perriam and Rajinder, Dudrah (2012). Likewise, we only need to consider Apichatpong Weerasethakuls films, whose radical alterity makes them extremely enigmatic, if not utterly perplexing for global audiences, to appreciate that they lack two essential characteristics of exoticism: firstly, their extreme Otherness precludes domestication, that is, integration into a familiar system of aesthetic and conceptual reference points and, secondly, they are largely devoid of the visual and sensuous allure that is a hallmark of exotic cinema. That is why, in the words of Fatimah Tobing Rony (1996: 6), the exotic is always already known [] explorers, anthropologists and tourists voyage to foreign places in search of the novel, the undiscovered. To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds toupgrade your browser. He was following in the footsteps of the painter Paul Gauguin, whose colourful paintings of semi-nude Polynesian women against the backdrop of lush tropical scenery have shaped the Western imagination of the Polynesian islands. The Presence, Influence and Collection of Seventeenth-Century Netherlandish Art in Hungary, Bibliography to Sehnsucht Persien/The Fascination of Persia. In. Painting natural knowledge in the early seventeenth century, The History of the Dutch and Flemish Art Collection of the Szpmvszeti Mzeum. One moose, two moose. ), Rembrandt and his Circle. In this essay, I set out to demonstrate that world cinema and exoticism are both traveling concepts, constituted in and through transnational mobility and the process of traversing cultural boundaries and borders of various kinds. Ungarn Jahrbuch. Halle, Randall (2010). . Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer. phil., Royal Holloway. A Subaltern Studies Reader: 19861995. Leiden circa 1630: Rembrandt Emerges, (Agnes Ethering Art Centre, Kingston ON; Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton AB; MacKenzie Gallery, Regina SK; Art Gallery of Hamilton, Hamilton ON; Vereniging van Nederlandse Kunsthistorici, Saul in Story and Tradition (Series Forschungen Zum Alten Testament), Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art vol. Framegrab. It really depends. ), The Ashgate Research Companion to Dutch Art of the Seventeenth Century, London 2016, pp. %PDF-1.7 London and New York: Routledge. Typographic Calque This occurs when typographical conventions that exist only in the source language are transferred to the new language. This article evaluates whether Lawrence Venuti's translation approach of "foreignisation" is likely to achieve his stated go al: translations that can resist cultural dominance. For instance, if I were translating the classic VW advertising text from the early 1990s, I might leave the German term for the joy of driving in German: Fahrvergngen. The Lords of Humankind: European Attitudes to the Outside World in the Imperial Age. The Persian-European Dialogue in Seventeenth-Century Art & Contemporary Art of Teheran, Rembrandt and everyday life: the fusion of genre and history, in Arthur J. DiFuria, ed., Genre Imagery in Early Modern Northern Europe: New Perspectives, London and New York: Routledge: An Ashgate Book, 2016, 161-182. The Hollywood Reporter, Performing Exoticism, Autoethnography and Cultural Translation, http://www.goethezeitportal.de/db/wiss/goethe/birus_weltliteratur.pdf, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/jan/21/the-assassin-review-captivatingly-hypnotic-if-impenetrable-wuxia-tale, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/raise-the-red-lantern-1992, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/assassin-cannes-review-797267, https://doi.org/10.1163/26659891-01020001. Similarly, exoticism, though a prevalent interpretative model in the transnational reception of world cinema, competes with other ones, such as those which, indebted to Fredric Jamesons influential but controversial essay Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism (1986), conceive of world cinema in terms of national (or political) allegory. The fact that Tanna as well as Embrace of the Serpent, which is set in the Amazon, were made in collaboration with Indigenous communities, who are credited with being the chief creative impetus and co-creators of these films, makes them not only politically correct but, arguably, also examples of self-exoticisation. London and New York: Routledge. Cultural Translation, Cosmopolitanism and the Void. ), Art in Iran and Europe in the 17th Century: Exchange and Reception (pp. In: Rosalind, Galt and Karl, Schoonover, eds., Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories. Essay on Exoticism: An Aesthetics of Diversity. Whereas the agency implied in the act of seeing is a form of power, being looked at is disempowering (a point also made by Laura Mulvey (1975) in her seminal essay on visual pleasure and the gendered scopic regimes of classical Hollywood cinema). Mulvey, Laura (1975). Framegrab. The fact that nineteenth-century photographs of indigenous people wearing the clothes of their colonial masters now strike us as more exotic than early photographs of nonwesternized, indigenous communities reminds us that exotic fantasies entail a contrast of, and hierarchy between, two different cultures, controlled by the Western point of view. When the concepts and structure of the source text can be easily translated into the target language, direct translation techniques are usually used. As I have demonstrated elsewhere (Berghahn, 2017), contemporary world cinema offers numerous examples of how exoticism is harnessed to new ethico-political agendas and a diverse range of humanitarian and ecological issues that have nothing in common with exoticisms tainted colonial legacy. Improve your vocabulary with English Vocabulary in Use from Cambridge. The cultural translation of world cinema corresponds with the de- and recontextualization of the exotic, whose alluring alterity only manifests itself when it is perceived by someone belonging to a different cultural sphere. Although the encounter with the strange and unfamiliar is one of the principal fascinations that world cinema affords transnational audiences, it invariably triggers the reflex to recover the strange as familiar (Nichols, 1994: 18), or to use the term I introduced in relation to the exotic, to domesticate it. "Jan van Vliet and Rembrandt van Rijn: Their Collaboration Reassessed", in: S. Dickey (ed. In: Isabel, Santaolalla, ed., New Exoticisms: Changing Patterns in the Construction of Otherness. If you were to imagine a range of translation options from -2 to 0 to +2, -2 might be a translation that is as close or loyal as possible to the German source text. The visual pleasure afforded by exotic cinemas sumptuous style is arguably the chief vehicle that allows world cinema to travel and be understood, or misunderstood, as the case may be, by transnational audiences who are potentially disadvantaged by a hermeneutic deficit of culturally specific knowledge when trying to understand films from outside their own cultural sphere. Nichols, Bill (1994). Tanna, made by the white Australian documentary filmmakers Martin Butler and Bentley Dean in collaboration with the Indigenous community of Tanna island (part of Melanesia) and which won the Audience Award as well as the prize for best cinematography at the Venice Film Festival in 2015, is an apt example.4 Although most critics have described it as a Romeo and Juliet story set in the South Pacific, in terms of its iconography and, indeed, narrative conceit of star-crossed lovers, Tanna betrays far more conspicuous similarities with Murnaus Tabu. Rembrandt and the Dutch Golden Age (exh. If we concur with Chow, then world cinema can never give a true or authentic representation of China, India, Africa or other cultures, since centuries of European cultural hegemony have conditioned non-Western filmmakers to see themselves through Western eyes. Set in ninth-century China during the tail end of the Tang Dynasty, it tells the story of Nie Yinniang, a female assassin who is commissioned to kill a series of government officials. In: Goethezeitportal [http://www.goethezeitportal.de/db/wiss/goethe/birus_weltliteratur.pdf]. Very interesting. By bringing world cinema and exoticism into conversation with cultural translation I have sought to consider exoticisms heuristic potential outside the dominant ideological discourse and thereby challenge the overwhelmingly pejorative connotations surrounding the concept. I seek to show that through vision and touch, and the proximity of objects to bodies in domestic environments, goods from all over the world become part of the material culture of the seventeenth-century Netherlands. Exoticism demonstrates itself in colorful spectacles of otherness purporting to be an unmediated expression of natural drives and instincts.

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