This talk follows the translation history of the Anglo-Jewish author Grace Aguilar’s 1850 novel The Vale of Cedars from Victorian England to Mainz, Warsaw, Vilna, Calcutta, and Tunis. A case study for my broader project on “Global Haskalah,” it brings together Sephardic studies, world literature and translation studies, transnational literary history, and Jewish literary studies. Through this project, I argue for two interventions: a rethinking of the nation-centered model of world literature, and a revision of the Eurocentric narrative of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment). The novel’s history begins with a work of minor literature by a Sephardic Englishwoman about a quintessential minority topic: crypto-Jews in the Spanish Inquisition. Originally intended as a refutation of English conversionists, by the end of the century the novel had appeared in multiple free translations into Hebrew, Yiddish, and Judeo-Arabic, refashioned to instill their readers with pride in historical Jewish nobility and martyrdom. In addition to mapping the book’s journey and elucidating the cultural markers of its myriad translations, the talk will foreground the Calcutta Judeo-Arabic edition and its social-historical context. This presentation is co-sponsored by The Center for the Middle East and North Africa (CMENA) at UCSC.
Lital Levy is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University, where she teaches comparative literature and theory, Hebrew literature, Arabic literature, and Jewish studies. Her work integrates literary and cultural studies with intellectual history and religious thought. She is the author of Poetic Trespass: Writing between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine (Princeton University Press, 2014), which won the MLA Prize for a First Book and awards from the AAJR and AJS. She is currently completing The Jewish Nahda, an intellectual history of Arab Jews and modernity.
Date | Time
November 10, 2021 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, November 17th; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.
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