Publications
Publication details [#5999]
Fazzini, Marco. 2002. Scotland, translation and Edwin Morgan’s Polyphonic Concerto of Voices. In Dimitriu, Ileana, ed. Translation, diversity and power. Special issue of Current Writing. Text and Reception in Southern Africa 14 (2): 118–134. ![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
Publication type
Article in Special issue
Publication language
English
Keywords
Person as a subject
Title as subject
Abstract
Fazzini explores cross-cultural discourse by interpreting Scottish literature as an expression of Bhabha’s ‘third space’: a space that displaces its constitutive histories to create, paradoxically, a more authentic - because hybrid - identity. Scottish literature is shown to be a form of ‘threshold literature’ (Morson), situated between the centrality of English and the ex-centric and multicultural position of the Scottish world. Flexible amalgamation and diversity-in-unity align Scottish literature with other postcolonial literatures, all of which tend to translate the gap between worlds through subversive processes of abrogation and appropriation. Fazzini shows that, over the last fifty years, the English canon has been appropriated and destroyed from within, through a self-conscious process of cultural and linguistic ‘contamination’-cum-translation. He illustrates his argument by analysing Edwin Morgan’s poetry, a relentless and subversive rewriting of the English literary tradition meant to reveal the postcolonial politics of the periphery as an affirmation of the multicultural self.
Source : Based on abstract in journal