The Queen's College Record 2020

ARTICLES
Articles
From Translating Illness to Translating COVID-19: a
Humanities Response to the Pandemic
Dr Marta Arnaldi, Laming Research Fellow
The 1998 film Sliding Doors, directed by Peter Howitt
and starring American actress Gwyneth Paltrow, follows
two parallel storylines, showing the divergent paths the
protagonist’s life could take depending on whether or
not she catches a train. In the past months, I have been
haunted by the realisation that we are, just like this character, continuously asked to
make a choice between the real and the virtual, the vigilant and the impulsive, the
rational and the absurd. The outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic has certainly
diverted our journey; but is there a right train?
Translating Illness: Imagined Design
As a former student of medicine and a
scholar of comparative literature, I have
always been fascinated by the ways
in which the psychical and the mental
worlds interact with, and shape, one
another. Translation is a vital vector of this
exchange; we translate to replicate our Logo designed by Eoin Kelleher
cells, protect our life, and communicate
to people who could not otherwise
understand or being understood. Sometimes, through the invisible paths of contagion
and trauma, translation can even make us ill. This is how and why I have asked myself
what different concepts and practices of translation have to do with one another, and
to what extent translation in the scientific sense (translational medicine, knowledge
translation) is different to the way in which we relate to a foreign language.
I created Translating Illness (www.queens.ox.ac.uk/translating-illness) to explore these
ideas. Supported by a Laming Research Fellowship at Queen’s, this interdisciplinary
project was awarded a double grant from the Wellcome Institutional Strategic Support
Fund and the John Fell Fund, Oxford, in order to promote, alongside primary research
on modern poet-translators, a series of research and public engagement activities. In
October 2019, I was writer in residence at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, where I
delivered a masterclass in creative writing in a foreign language, i.e. English. In January
2020, I inaugurated a College-based seminar series which was turned into podcast
episodes (podcasts.ox.ac.uk/people/marta-arnaldi). On 1 March 2020, I took a plane
to New York in order to start a visiting fellowship at the Department of English and
102 The Queen’s College | College Record 2020