Elizabeth Jolley

As a sample of the Australian female Gothic, critical discussion of Elizabeth Jolley’s The Well (1986) has centrally                    focused on issues of gender, but not considered its racial  inscription. This lack is especially relevant when criticism, despite praising the author’s experimentation with narrative technique and genre, tends to voice dissatisfaction with  the novel’s conclusion in medias res, which never solves the tension between a presumed return to the patriarchal norm and the voicing of liberating alternatives. After reviewing issues of genre, gender and class, this paper proposes a postcolonial perspective so as to come to terms with this dilemma, and argues that the text signals the impossibility of suppressing the Native from the contemporary Australian land and textscape, whose Gothic articulation in the uncanny shape of the male well-dweller haunts the novel’s engagement with female empowerment. The female protagonist may only start overcoming a crippling gender discourse in the White postcolonial pastoralist setting by inscribing herself into ‘Australianness’. Reconciling her body with the land is significantly staged in terms of an Aboriginal cosmogony, as it is a ‘walkabout’ that allows Hester to start controlling her body and story. Thus, The Well may be
understood to be inconclusive because it struggles to map gender across race at a time of Aboriginal-exclusive multiculturalism. Written in the mid 1980s, it announces a point of inflection in thinking about native-nonnative relationships which would soon lead to attempts at ‘Reconciliation’ by mainstream Australia.

Introduction to the Critical Soundings special issue of JASAL. This special issue will consider whether it is possible to claim a distinct sonic texture for Australian literary and cultural formations. What kind of readings result from attending to the relation between silence and the colonial past in Judith Wright’s poetry, to the litany of voices in Christina Stead’s modern vision of Sydney, or the complex links between music and landscape in Tim Winton’s Western Australian coast? Extending a range of historical and theoretical work on sound into an Australian context, this special issue will explore the multiple auditory dimensions of aesthetic, literary and sonic practices in a range of historical, geographical and cultural domains.

The present research encompasses a source-oriented translation into Italian of Jolley’s Mr
Scobie’s Riddle, as well as an exegesis with various analyses and comments on the translation.
Theo Hermans laments how, “when we study existing translations […] we can only see the
outcome of the translator choices” and how “the motives, the pattern of instructions which
informed the choices, can only be inferred”. This research captures both the outcome of the
translation, as well as the thinking process behind translational decisions.
A tendency to sacrifice culture-specific elements and stylistic peculiarities to preserve bello
scrivere can be found within Australian literature translated into Italian. Norms and rules existing
in the target language and culture are often prioritised over an author’s own writing technique
and elements specific to the source culture. Accordingly, unmarked structures are also often
preferred to marked structures, with the result that Australian literature is often homogenised, its
Australianness blurred.
This translational and analytical research strives to preserve the above described elements in
translation as the expression of something Other, a different culture, and to take Italian readers
on a journey to the Australia depicted in Mr Scobie’s Riddle so that Jolley’s characters’ voices
can echo in the Italian language.
The author aimed to use translation as a tool to analyse Jolley’s novel, to dive deep into the
microcosm of Mr Scobie’s Riddle. In order to achieve this purpose and for the specificity of
Jolley’s novel to be maintained in translation, three types of analysis were undergone: the first, a
narratological analysis of the novel; the second, a translational analysis of the novel to translate,
a type of analysis carried out before the beginning the translation process; finally, an analysis of
the translated text and the main issues stemming from the contrast between the two languages
and cultures involved.
The results obtained bring together translation and analysis, practice and theory, in an attempt
to preserve the Australia represented in the original and to show the thought process behind
translational choices.

https://www.cambridgescholars.com/translation-as-criticism

This special issue will consider whether it is possible to claim a distinct sonic texture for Australian literary and cultural formations. What kind of readings result from attending to the relation between silence and the colonial past in Judith Wright's poetry, to the litany of voices in Christina Stead's modern vision of Sydney, or the complex links between music and landscape in Tim Winton's Western Australian coast? Since the coining of the term 'soundscape' by R. Murray Schafer in 1969 there has been a growing critical awareness of the sonic dimensions of modern culture. Indeed Jonathan Sterne has argued in The Audible Past (2003) that just as 'there was an Enlightenment, so too was there an 'Ensoniment' …a series of conjunctures among ideas, institutions, and practices [that] rendered the world audible in new ways and valorised new constructs of hearing and listening' (2). Paralleling the broader cultural focus of Sterne, theoretical work by Steven Connor and Juan Suarez has argued for an attunement to the auditory dimensions of literary experience, rethinking what Garrett Stewart suggestively describes in Reading Voices (1990) as 'the listening throat and mouth of the reading voice' (11). Extending this historical and theoretical work on sound into an Australian context, this special issue will explore the multiple auditory dimensions of aesthetic, literary and sonic practices in a range of historical, geographical and cultural domains.

Themes, places, characters and voices of Elizabeth Jolley’s Mr Scobie’s Riddle are explored in detail in this monograph, which provides different narratological and translational analyses of the novel, as well as an academic translation into Italian.

Considering the challenges and issues posited by a literary work’s translation helps to shed light on the original work itself. In this manner, the translation is to be seen as a further analytical instrument to gain insight into the original novel.

The purpose of this work is to obtain a deeper understanding of the complicated microcosm created by Jolley in the nursing home of “St Christopher and St Jude”: the typically Australian themes of migration, isolation, place and displacement; the Australian culture-specific elements; the ensemble of curious characters and their entertaining voices. This book strives to preserve the above elements in translation as the expression of something Other, a different culture, and to take Italian readers on a journey to the Australia depicted in Mr Scobie’s Riddle so that Jolley’s characters’ voices can echo in the Italian language.

http://www.cambridgescholars.com/translation-as-criticism