Araceli María Alanís Corral and Ali Arjmandi present Life Writing as Translation at Uni Mail, Geneva; life writing mediates languages and identities
Araceli María Alanís Corral and Ali Arjmandi present Life Writing as Translation at Uni Mail, Geneva; life writing mediates languages and identities Life writing Écritures de soi et traduction and translation 18 &19 June - Uni Mail, Geneva Book of abstracts 1 Life Writing as Translation: Reading Hajeb’s Translational Life Araceli María Alanís Corral – University of Salamanca Ali Arjmandi – Independent Researcher In Jang-e Zendegi [Life’s Battle] (2023), Maryam Saeedi presents a biography of Hajeb (1898–1982 CE), one of the first publicly recognized women translators in Iran. The biography examines her professional journey and personal experiences, acting as a translation of her life through the eyes of another translation scholar. Life writing involves transposing memory, identity, and experience into narrative form, as the works by Karpinski (2012), Grass and Robert-Foley (2024), and Tavener-Smith (2024) show. Arguing that life writing is indeed an act of mediation and translation, rather than a transparent recording of lived experience, this paper addresses the question of how a translator’s life can be a source of translation and, particularly, how this biography is a translation of Hajeb’s life into narrative form. To this end, it argues that the translator’s life, analyzed through methods such as genetic translation studies and the materiality of translation, illuminates both the process of life writing and the practice of translation itself. The double mediation of (Hajeb’s life in) translation and (a translation of) her life, conveys how the translator’s life is an endless act of negotiating languages, cultures, and identities. Thus, examining Jang-e Zendegi as a translation reevaluates biography as a creative act of translation, and contributes to the field of TS by developing the studies on Iranian women translators from the perspective of genetic and material translation. References Grass, D., & Robert-Foley, L. (Eds.). (2024). The translation memoir [Special issue]. Life Writing, 20(1). Karpinski, E. C. (Ed.). (2012). Borrowed tongues: Life writing, migration, and translation. Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Tavener-Smith, T. (2024). Establishing narrative voice and encountering the “I” through identity creation in life writing. Life Writing, 21(3), 471–482. ...