Russell Scott Valentino Research Collection

Permanent link for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/2022/25641

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Diversity Plans Can’t Breathe without AIIR: Building a High-Caliber Diversity Initiative
(Insight into Diversity, 2018-10-17) Brooks, Rachel Ann; Clyburn, Tayo; Milton, Lyonel; Valentino, Russell Scott; Walker, Bonnie; Williams, Damon A.
For one intensive month this summer, we participated in an online leadership development program, the National Inclusive Excellence Leadership Academy (NIXLA), with nearly 100 leaders from across the country. The twin goals of the program were to hone our strategic diversity leadership skills and strengthen our best-practice too kit of resources, frameworks, and tactics for leading real change that we can see and feel on our campuses in the area of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Stations of the Crossing: The Common Source in Nonfiction and Translation
(91st Meridian, 2008) Valentino, Russell Scott
A reader of one of Samuel Johnson’s works once supposedly wrote him to ask what he had intended by a certain passage in one of his works. In his response, Johnson wrote that when he was composing the passage, only two beings in the universe knew what was in his mind, himself and God, but now, looking back on it, God only knew what he was thinking just then. While the story may in fact be apocryphal, it can serve as a helpful point of departure in discussions about the intentional fallacy in fiction and poetry, that is, reading texts as if their meaning could be reduced to the intentions of an author. An author might, for instance, forget over time the things that went into the work other than the words put down on the page at the moment of creation. A more radical position might be to say that an author of an artistic work never really had any other way to express the thoughts in her or his mind than those that ended up on the page.
A Matter of Trust
(91st Meridian, 2007) Valentino, Russell Scott
Let me begin by suggesting an approach to studying translation that is distinguishable from, say, artistic approaches at one extreme (the art of translation à la Kornei Chukovsky or perhaps Gregory Rabassa) and theoretical approaches at another (the theory of translation, from George Steiner or Antoine Berman to J.C. Catford, Donald Davidson, or Emily Apter). A rhetorical approach makes questions of audience and effect the most central. Obviously political issues come into play as well, but so do questions of ethos, the positioning of the author within the target culture, the creation of literary personae, and also the positioning of the translator. This intersects with the business of translation, which is where I should probably have started, by noting the enormous quantities of books published in the U.S. in a given year (150,000 titles, perhaps more) and the simultaneous paucity of translations (maybe 450, most of those of the “classics”). I want to ask: is it any wonder that Americans tend to be insular in their thinking? How might translation have an impact on the way people perceive the world outside the borders of their own language territory?
Book Review: The New Moscow Philosophy
(Slavic and East European Journal, 2014) Valentino, Russell Scott
Vyacheslav Pyetsukh’s New Moscow Philosophy, originally published in Novyi Mir No. 1 in 1989 as Novaia Moskovskaia filosofiia, is set up like a murder mystery that slowly emerges as a parody of a murder mystery. Unlike its primary inspiration, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, this novel may or may not involve an actual murder—we don’t find out until the end of part III. Nor do we find anything like the setting of that earlier work, as all the action takes place in a communal apartment in which all of the book’s idiosyncratic characters are residents. The thirteen are listed in the manner of a cast on the novel’s first page, giving the book the feel of a dramatic production, a performance in which the narrator takes part, commenting, contextualizing, and playing himself. The action takes place over three days, Friday to Sunday, and Monday serves as an epilogue. The book is tightly organized, careful, allusive in all sorts of ways that literary types will appreciate, and hilarious.
Daring and Doubting
(The National Endowment for the Arts, 2014) Valentino, Russell Scott
I remember a talk given by Michael Henry Heim in which he was asked by an admirer how he dared to translate from such a variety of different languages. He very quickly turned the innocent question into an occasion for self-critique, asking of himself not how do you dare but how dare you!? It was a fine illustration of the subtle inflections in Heim’s communication, the little gems of irony and innuendo that sparkled in his speech, his letters, and, most of all, his many translations. But it was also a serious question, suggesting a deep suspicion from outside—can you really know enough to do that?—and a potentially productive doubt from inside—can I really know enough to do this?
A Translator's Dilemma
(The Del Sol Review, 2011) Valentino, Russell Scott
Translation and the Teaching of Literature
(Words Without Borders, 2009-07-21) Valentino, Russell Scott
In my first post, I suggested that translators' efforts in the sphere of education might have a transformative effect on the understanding and appreciation of the work of translation. In my second, I focused on the domain of foreign language teaching as one place where such efforts might bear fruit. Several people commented and asked questions about these posts, and I promise to respond to their questions in a subsequent post. But first I would like to turn to another educational sphere in which the concerted and systematic effort of translator-teachers and the teaching of translation as a practice might serve a transformative—that is, fundamentally educational—role.
Translation and Proficiency Language Teaching
(Words Without Borders, 2009-05-14) Valentino, Russell Scott
In a previous post, I suggested that the covers of books make for rather poor soil in which to cultivate an appreciation for translated contemporary literature among the general English-reading public. Of course the essential work of translators should be recognized whenever possible, on covers and title pages, and in bios, prefaces, reviews, and interviews. But if highlighting the fact of a book's having been translated makes it less likely that readers will be interested in it, less likely that they will pick it up from the book store shelf and select it over the equally or lower-priced volume with similar content crammed next to it, then all that attention to translation might be doing harm rather than good. It might. In any case, surely there are better places than the retail book store for teachers to focus their attention and effort in order to raise translation awareness, understanding, recognition, and appreciation, and by extension, change reading practices and tastes.
Teaching in Translation
(Words Without Borders, 2009-04-20) Valentino, Russell Scott
The general membership meeting of the American Literary Translators Association's annual conference in October of this year went smoothly until the final item of business. The members present were sharply divided over the newly imposed rule stipulating that only books with the translator's name printed on the cover should be eligible for the National Translation Award, which is administered by that organization. The rationale for the new rule is clear enough—publishers should pay more attention, and encourage readers to pay more attention, to the fact of translation; and translators should be better recognized and acknowledged for their work. A familiar story. Requiring that only books with translators' names on their covers be eligible for the annual award was seen, by some ALTA members at least, as a form of slightly righteous pressure applied to the gatekeepers of publishing.
The Oxymoron of Empathic Criticism: Readerly Empathy, Critical Explication, and the Translator's Creative Understanding
(Poroi: an Interdisciplinary Journal of Rhetorical Analysis and Invention, 2005-03) Valentino, Russell Scott
Empathy is a relatively new term in English. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it was first attested in 1904. This is worth pondering.
Me Bastard, You Bastard: Multiculturalism at Home and Abroad
(The Iowa Review, 2003) Valentino, Russell Scott
rom Rovinj's post office to the old harbor it is some three hundred paces. You pass a half-dozen cafes. With a slight effort you can make it an even dozen. A shot of Istra Bitter here, a Pelinkovac there, Malvazija, Malvasia, before you know it, it's time for dinner. Yasuko does not take that route, Iknow. Two boys are chasing each other across the small slab of concrete behind the news kiosk. As she passes, they glance up and, without ceasing to run after each other in circles that now encompass her, begin calling, "Japanka, japanka!"
Book Review: Origin and Identity: Essays on Svevo and Trieste
(Annali d’Italianistica, 2003) Valentino, Russell Scott
Elizabeth Schächter's keen integration of sources in Origin and Identity becomes evident in her first chapter, "Trieste: A City of Paradox," which surveys Triestine cultural history from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries from a variety of contrasting viewpoints: Habsburg, irredentist, Slovene, fascist. This essay is largely successful at painting a picture, with the "doppia anima" of Svevo at its center, of the unique "multicultural, multi-ethnic border city" that was Trieste at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. But Schächter's otherwise painstaking attention to detail — every page contains from four to eleven footnotes, averaging between six and seven — actually points to a telling deficiency.
Book Review: The Modernization of Russia
(Slavic and East European Journal, 2001) Valentino, Russell Scott
Simon Dixon's treatment of The Modernisation of Russia 1676-1825 is careful not to sacrifice precision in striving for comprehensiveness. Nor does it simply seek to apply any rigidly conceived theoretical matrix to Russia in the period in question. On the contrary, Dixon emphasizes that "modernization theory is useful only if we reject its more restrictive implications" (112). In keeping with the broad aims of the series in which it appears, his book uses modernization theory as a "comparative analytic framework" for viewing Russian development in a European context.

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