Faculty Presenter:
Ag Apolloni
Visiting Scholar in Comp Lit
Professor of Literature, University of Pristina
Albanian Novelist, Playwright, Poet, and Essayist

Title | The Ballad of the Dead Brother: Origin and Variants

This study examines the ballad of the dead brother who returns to fulfill a promise. Taking Ismail Kadare’s novel The Ghost Rider as the most recent literary reworking of this balladic tradition, the research traces the motif through numerous European variants, seeking the invariant, in line with Milman Parry’s hypothesis that this type of song should be understood as a continuation and residual form of the Homeric tradition.
The project focuses on both written and oral variants of this ballad, including an Albanian novel, a German poem, and many oral versions in Serbian, Romanian, Greek, Albanian, and other languages. Through this comparative lens, the study explores intertextual relations with myths and legends from Balkan folklore as well as the broader European tradition.
Furthermore, the research addresses the origin of the narrative event at the core of the ballad and examine its circulation across languages, cultures, and countries as an example of a work belonging to world literature long before Goethe coined the term Weltliteratur.

Faculty Respondent:
David Damrosch
Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Comparative Literature

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Graduate Student Presenter:
Lara Norgaard, PhD Student in Comparative Literature

Title | Activist Translation: Emancipatory Interpretations of the Latin American ‘Boom’ in Indonesia

This talk analyzes Indonesian translations of Brazilian social theory and literary texts from the Latin American “Boom,” which circulated in Java and Jakarta during the Indonesian anti-authoritarian student movement in the 1980s and 1990s. I propose that these texts can be understood as activist translations, in which the material processes of translating, publishing, distributing, and reading a foreign text is embedded in a larger project for social change. Though they spoke no Spanish or Portuguese and relied on existing English translations, Indonesian activist-translators advanced interpretations of source texts that were grounded in Indonesian political concerns, and specifically in a desire to revive practices of social commitment in the arts in the wake of state violence and censorship. Although such activist translations were ephemeral, as they circulated by way of clandestine pamphlets or fell quickly out of print, I show that they nevertheless continued to influence how Indonesian authors grappled with narrating histories of state violence at the turn of the twenty-first century, as Indonesia transitioned out of decades of authoritarian rule. This talk ultimately demonstrates that translation practices that might be disregarded for a lack of canonicity, accuracy, or “fidelity” to source texts can be culturally significant because of their political urgency.