A Collaborative Experiment: Translating the Manifesto of Equals

This roundtable will reflect on a collaborative translation project involving students and researchers at King’s College London. This focused on The Manifesto of Equals (1796), a French revolutionary text by Sylvain Maréchal that calls for a complete overthrown of the status quo in the name of radical egalitarianism. We will present our responses to the challenges of translating radical revolutionary language into English and into the present, reactivating the subversive potential of the original French words and their fiery rhetoric. Our collaborative practice seeks ways to reenact the plural, collective nature of revolutionary language, moving beyond the figure of the lone author/translator.

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Moderator

Rosa Mucignat is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at King’s College London. Currently she is working on a database of radical translations between France, Britain, and Italy during the French Revolution (https://radicaltranslations.org).

Presenters

Cristina Viti is a translator and poet working mainly in Italian, English, and French. Recent or forthcoming publications include co-translations of Pier Paolo Pasolini (with Rosa Mucignat) and of the poetry of Anna Greki (with Souheila Haïmiche). Her translation of Elsa Morante’s The World Saved by Kids (Seagull 2016) was shortlisted for the John Florio Prize. Sanja Perovic is Reader in 18th-Century French Studies at King’s College London, as well as principal investigator of the AHRC-funded project “Radical Translations: The Transfer of Revolutionary Culture in Britain, France, and Italy (1789-1815)”. She also has previous experience leading performance-based collaborative translation projects on revolutionary themes. Kathryn Woods is a final-year French and English student, and wrote her undergraduate dissertation on French literary translation and queerness through the lens of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. She is also a musician and tours internationally with her band.