Sensing to Translate: A Reading of Silvina Ocampo’s Short Story “La Calle Sarandi”

Literary translators need to be able to sense or ‘feel’ a text in order to generate an emotionally resonant target text in translation, however, the ineffable nature of atmospheres in short stories can make this task difficult. This study explores the complex process of identifying sensory cues in literary works, focusing on Silvina Ocampo’s unsettling short story "La calle Sarandi" (1937). Through a phenomenological approach combining close reading and computer-aided qualitative data analysis, the research examines how perceptual sensory cues are encoded as sensory imagery both in their original and in their translated forms.
The study tracks sensory markers to identify and foreground textual components that trigger emotional responses. Findings reveal a significant number of sensory markers interwoven with the narrative structure, contributing to the story’s atmospheric qualities. The discussion explores how these sensory markers aid in making sense of the story and how they can be effectively recreated in translation.
This research highlights the importance of sensory perception in literary translation, particularly for texts like Ocampo’s, and provides insights into the delicate relationship between sensory cues and narrative structure of the short story.
Keywords: Translation, atmosphere, phenomenology, perception, sensory markers

Lay Sion Ng √ (University of Tsukuba, Japan)

Olfactory Ethics in Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and Other Works

This presentation contextualizes the environmental significance of olfactory descriptions in Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and other works. It analyzes how they intervene in the text to immerse readers in the physical, socio-cultural, and symbolic implications. By doing so, the study challenges the perception of nature as a separate entity, instead positing it through smell as inherently transcorporeal, making smell itself essential for comprehending embodied experiences. At the heart of the presentation's argument lies the exploration of the relationships between olfaction and the concept of ‘home’ and ‘not-home.’ It illustrates how smells can recall memories of childhood innocence and intimate connections with nature while evoking associations with war and death, highlighting the transboundary nature of olfaction. This exploration encourages audiences to reconsider the dichotomies between life and death, humans and nonhumans, suggesting a form of olfactory ethics inherent in Hemingway’s narrative.
Keywords: Ernest Hemingway, olfactory ethics, transcorporeality, home, not-home

Zihan Guo (East Asian Studies, Princeton University, USA)

Literary and Medical Imaginations of Intestinal Sensations in Medieval China (7th–13th c.)

Medieval Chinese poets contemplated and composed with their intestines. The literary trope of “broken intestines,” referring figuratively to unbearable misery and pain, was from early times dissociated from its literal referent. However, the actual corporeal sensations of intestines resurfaced in medieval Chinese poetics. This paper traces the transformation of the imagery of intestines from a metaphor of woe into a motif of rumination in medieval China. Literary discourses depicted intestines as a storehouse of books, echoing medical theories that envisioned them to be repositories of life energy. The spatial imagination of intestines draws on the synesthetic idea of taste that signifies at once aesthetic discrimination and gustatory sensation. The rumbling intestines, tortured by hunger, cannot but be satiated by books and knowledge. Attending to the ecology between the senses and the intellect, the body and the mind, medieval Chinese writers constructed an alternative vision of knowledge as nutrient and themselves as austere epicures.
Keywords: intestines, hunger, knowledge, anatomy, poetry