Alexandra Lopes

Who’s afraid of Charles John Huffam Dickens? “Universal” literature, Mário Domingues and the anxiety of the unfinished novel

Volume 43 of the series Selected Works by Selected Authors presents a conundrum that may be best understood from the angle of Translation Studies. O Mistério de Edwin Drood – a translation of Charles Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood – challenges concepts of authority and authorship, while allowing the researcher to investigate literature in transit and the makings of a “universal” literature. Famously, Dickens died before concluding the novel in 1870. Mário Domingues and Gentil Marques, the series’ translator and editor, decided that, while the novel merited inclusion, it could not be published in its incomplete form. Thus the novel was published in 1958 as “translated and continued.” This paper addresses the (in)visibility of the translational intervention and its underlying concepts of “literature,” “(sub)version” and “(un)translatability.” The discussion of the tenets of the series is theoretically couched in the debate on world literature, including Apter’s positioning in Against World Literature.

Keywords: translation history, authorship, “universal” literature

Biography

Alexandra Lopes is Assistant Professor and Chair of the Culture Studies Department at the Catholic University of Portugal in Lisbon, where she teaches Translation History and Theory and Literary Translation. She holds an MA in German Studies and a PhD in Translation Studies. From 1998 to 2005, she was a member of the research project Histories of Literature and Translations: Representations of the Other in the Portuguese Culture. She is currently a member of two research projects: Culture and Conflict and Intercultural Literature in Portugal 1930-2000. She has published several papers on Translation Studies and has translated texts by authors such as Peter Handke, Hertha Müller, William Boyd and Salman Rushdie.