Sex, Psyche, and Politics: Eden and Cedar Paul as Activist Translators of European Modernity
Venue
Violet Laidlaw Room, Chrystal Macmillan BuildingMedia
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Description
Cosmopolitan revolutionaries and activist translators Eden and Cedar Paul (1865-1944/1880-1972) held a crucial role as cultural mediators of European modernity in the Anglophone world. Their roughly 250 translations—from German, French, Italian and Russian, a surprising number reprinted to this day—included a wide array of authors and themes: from Stefan Zweig to Sigmund Freud, from socialist theories to sex reform and research. This paper examines the Pauls' navigations between translatory activism and pragmatism, exploring their intellectual networks, trust-building and mediating strategies, and efforts to cultivate new markets. It analyses the opportunities and limitations of activist translation in the context of pragmatic concerns, shifting political landscapes, and evolving intellectual networks.
Co-badged with the Histories of Gender and Sexualities Research Group.
Birgit Lang is Professor of German Studies at The University of Melbourne and has published widely in the history of sexuality and psychoanalysis as well as in exile and translation studies. She is series co-editor of Translation History (Palgrave Macmillan).
Selected Publications: “Translators’ Performance of Trustworthiness” (with A. Rizzi). Translation Studies 18.2 (2025), 206–221; “Censorship in Flux: Sex and Sexological Knowledge at the Great Police Exhibition of 1926 in Weimar Germany”. Journal of the History of Sexuality, 33.1 (2024); What is Translation History? A Trust-Based Approach (with A. Rizzi and A. Pym, Palgrave 2019); A History of the Case Study: Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Literature (Manchester UP, 2017).
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