ABSTRACT
This chapter approaches translation as a multi-agential social practice underpinned by the individual histories of the agents involved in introducing a foreign work into a domestic national field – i.e., their dispositions and positions among social structures – and the histories that underline these interconnected structures. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts of structure, agency, and the habitus (1993) and Genette’s peritext (1997), this chapter explores how translations are (re)framed across time and space via the symbolic acts of all involved agents through the case of Nicholas Gage’s memoir/autobiographical-cum-literary work Eleni (1983) and its Greek translation. Crucially, this chapter challenges the notion of translatorial agency (Simeoni 1998) being singular and argues for a translational agency as the cumulative agentic gestures – those of the translator, the publisher(s), and other figures – that assemble to dominate a work’s trajectory in the field of reception, proposing that (re)framing processes are the outcome of a supra-individual agency active within the singular cultural transfer context.
