Please join us for our upcoming seminar on: "Fixers, an Alternative History of Translation and Communication" by Prof. Zrinka Stahuljak (University of California).

Monday, May 3, 2021, from 18:30 to 20:00 (Israel time) via zoom.

To receive the Zoom link, please subscribe by contacting Alon Ben Yehuda on alon.ben-yehuda@mail.huji.ac.il.

ABSTRACT

Medieval Fixers takes a comprehensive look at translation that includes communication and interpreting, and all their attendant features (intelligibility, commensurability, agency, ethics). Fixers, an old journalistic term, are agents who perform a range of tasks, acting as interpreters, local informants, guides, mediators, brokers, and more. I think of them as multifunctional intermediaries with multiple linguistic, social, cultural, and topographical skills and knowledge. This approach explores medieval writings as a dynamic field of experience, as it moves the conversation from the textual and intertextual to the oral and interpersonal; from requirements of accuracy and fidelity to parameters of intelligibility, commensurability, and loyalty in translation; from the sole focus in translation studies on interpreters to fixers; from fixers as persons (and biographies) to fixers as dispositifs (apparatus). I focus here on how the fixer as a dispositif can be used in the historical study of communication in the Middle Ages and how this historical dispositif – with the focus on commensurability, relationality (ethics), collaboration – changes the method and the content with which we have been reading medieval European writings of all genres.

Zrinka Stahuljak, Professor of Comparative Literature and French at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), has written widely on medieval vernacular literature, historiography, and contemporary translation studies. She is the author of Les Fixeurs au Moyen Âge: Histoire et littérature connectées (2021), Médiéval contemporain: Pour une littérature connectée (2020), Pornographic Archaeology: Medicine, Medievalism, and the Invention of the French Nation (2013; French trans. 2018), Bloodless Genealogies of the French Middle Ages (2005), and co-author of The Adventures of Gillion de Trazegnies: Chivalry and Romance in the Medieval East (2015), and Thinking Through Chrétien de Troyes (2011). She is currently preparing Medieval Fixers: Translation Across the Mediterranean, 1250-1500, on interlingual mediators in the medieval Mediterranean (UP Chicago). Her work has been recognized, among others, with a visiting professorship at the Collège de France (2018), and fellowships from the Guggenheim (2016), Fulbright (2012-13), and the IAS Princeton (2005-06).