King's College London

Spatial imagination plays a significant role in the production of fiction. How writers navigate and inhabit imaginary spaces is reflected in the descriptions of material elements of fictional cultures, landscapes, objects, and people as well as in the maps drawn by or for them. Literary cartography is on the rise, but the phenomenology and ontology of subjective space in translation as critically oppositional to or different in other ways from the original text remain largely marginalized, even though a translator’s imagination is as much anchored in specific contexts as the original text. This paper discusses the challenges of bringing to light the hidden topographies of literary imagination in translation with reference to the VRELL project.