Translation plus: on literary translation and creative writing

Abstract

How do the disciplines of translation studies and creative writing relate in an institutional setting or in current practice more broadly? What role does translation play in the creative writing workshop or classroom, especially for students writing in English as a second language? What benefits are there in the interchange? What can translation add? The article considers these questions in a wide-ranging discussion of writing processes that recognize translation as both a constraint and a highly elastic and enabling concept. Reference is made to writers such as Juan Pablo Villalobos, Ben Lerner and Merlinda Bobis whose work is thematically concerned with issues of translation, and the author’s own novel, The Red Thread, which adapts a Chinese text, as well as pedagogical experiments in creative writing involving literary texts from languages other than English. This contributes to an argument that translation is an integral part of contemporary creative practice in a world characterized by mobility, multiplicity and transculturalism.