The conference Black Sea Literature and Culture and Beyond - Inter-Reflections of Translation and Literature seeks to explore how literary and translational trajectories generate what may be termed inter-reflexive systems: configurations in which translations interact not only with source texts but also with other translations, historical imaginaries, and cognitive schemas embedded within specific cultural contexts of the Black Sea and beyond.

Edith W. Clowes conceptualises post-Soviet culture in Russia on the Edge: Imagined Geographies and Post-Soviet Identity (Cornell University Press, 2011) and “The Return of Eurasia: Imagining Empire in Post-Soviet Russia” (Ab Imperio, 3 (2005), 69–96). Clowes’s article shifts imperial imaginaries and frames the Black Sea as a dynamic cultural site rather than a periphery.

Positioned at the intersection of empires, languages, and shifting cultural hegemonies, the Black Sea constitutes a complex translational space shaped by asymmetrical flows, mediated circulation, and layered dependencies. Therefore, a literature of the Black Sea region, would be typically a ‘Small’ Literature, as Yordan Lyutskanov ("A ‘Small’ Literature, that is: Literature with Limited Translational Opportunities, of Structural Undercapacity and Voluntary Self-diminishment," 2024) points out national literatures are posed to dependence on dominant linguistic channels that perpetuates structural subordination.  Susanna Witt (2011: 150-151) explores the themes instrumental to the study of literary translation in the context of Soviet culture, pointing out that there are gaps in research regarding the study of literary translation in the context of Soviet culture. This argument can be well-extended to the Black Sea translational space.

Bela Tsipuria’s works highlight Georgia’s “in-between” position, where cultural texts reveal both imposed imperial narratives and local efforts to preserve agency (2021). Her work often examines how literary representation functions as a site where colonial power is reproduced, challenged, or reimagined in the post-Soviet context (2016).

Hayate Sotome considers Ilia Chavchavadze's "Letters of a Traveler" (2019) as a distinctly postcolonial work, and Gül Mükerrem Öztürk (2025), in the same light, writes about Translation and Power in Georgia exploring Socialist Realism to Post-Soviet Market Pressures.

Khatuna Beridze’s Black Sea, Trilingual Reflections: Georgian and Russian Literature (2022–2023) identifies a “trilingual condition” in Georgian writing that oscillates between languages and interlinear trots. Her theoretical approach to the analysis explores theories of Cognitive Linguistics (Lacoff, Johnson, 1989, 1999), the Habitus (Bourdieu's (1991) and Cultural Archive (Said, 1993).

Ukrainian research, led by Lada Kolomiyets (2023), exposes the political anatomy of translation under totalitarian rule. Her archival studies of the 1930s “Executed Renaissance” demonstrate how Stalinist purges destroyed Ukraine’s direct Western translation culture.

Bulgarian scholarship, from Boyko Penchev (2012), to Alexander Kiossev (1995, 2004), and Miglena Nikolchina (2013) - shifts the focus from coercion to voluntary emulation.

Romanian theorists highlight translation as both refuge and resistance. Lidia Vianu’s (1998) idea of “translation as asylum” describes how writers used translation to survive censorship, keeping literary language alive under the “wooden language” of propaganda. Maria Sass (2018) redefines translation as an internal dialogue between Romania’s German and Romanian traditions, the Transylvanian model where translation becomes a means of European self-identification rather than subordination.

Turkish research, represented by Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar and Saliha Paker (2015), foregrounds translation as a tool of state planning and ideological re-engineering.

The global circulation of Georgian literature offers a particularly revealing case of how “small literatures” navigate asymmetrical translation systems and negotiate visibility within the world literary space. In this context, translation emerges not merely as transfer but as a strategic act of cultural positioning, where translational choices shape how national literature is framed for international audiences.

Alexis Nuselovici (Nouss) (2022) advocates for a paratranslational ethics that embraces the threshold as a space of creative tension, where translation is an act of hospitality to the foreign without erasing its difference. It calls for translators to recognize their role as active, critical agents who generate new linguistic and cultural forms through the very act of translating on the threshold.

Mzago Dokhtourichvili's article “La représentation linguistique de différentes cultures à travers une même langue (2021) of Assia Djebar (Algeria), Tahar Ben Jelloun (Morocco), and Andrei Makine (Russia) demonstrates how writers use French as a non-native language to express distinct cultural identities while challenging fixed notions of belonging. Against this background, the situational analysis of Black Sea writers is interesting to analyze: there are other models of exile and cultural translation.

What unites the literatures of the Black Sea region in translation?

Shakespeare stands as a shared translational and cultural axis of the Black Sea cultures. Circulating across the region through direct and indirect translations, Shakespeare’s works offer a unique opportunity to trace diachronic shifts, intermediary influences, and inter-reflexive translation practices. In many cases, Shakespeare in the Black Sea context is not a direct encounter with the English original, but a palimpsestic construct, shaped by prior translations and dominant linguistic filters.

Recent developments in corpus-based and corpus-driven translation studies offer powerful tools for systematically investigating the Black Sea translational space, particularly in relation to asymmetrical mediation, indirect translation, and diachronic layering. Corpus linguistic approaches with aligned multilingual corpora make it possible to empirically identify whether translations are produced directly from source texts or mediated through dominant languages, and to map how these trajectories evolve across time. Researchers can trace recurring patterns in lexical choice, stylistic normalization, pragmatic shifts, and the persistence of intermediary influence. At the same time, the integration of cognitive linguistics, enables a deeper analysis of how meaning is not merely transferred but restructured in translation. This cognitive dimension intersects productively with Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, which foregrounds the historically and socially conditioned dispositions guiding translators’ choices. In the Black Sea context and beyond, translational habitus may reflect ideological constraints, institutional norms, and inherited literary models. This conference proposes to reconceptualize the Black Sea as a dynamic laboratory of translation, where texts do not merely move between languages but are continuously reconstituted through processes of mediation, reinterpretation, and ideological reframing. case studies of modern translations, exploring how contemporary works are reframed across linguistic and cultural boundaries, and how they negotiate between local specificity and global legibility.

Key Topics

The main topics of the conference are:

• The Black Sea, National Literature and Translation

• The Black Sea and Beyond: The Practice of Literary Translation: Empirical Studies

• Understanding Shakespeare in the Common Cultural-Translational Space of the Black Sea

• From Cognitive Linguistics to Cognitive Translation Studies

• Literary and Translation Inter-Reflections in the Contexts of Icon Schemes, Habitus and Cultural Archives

• Corpus Linguistic Research Models of Literary Translation

• Cultural Imperialism and Censorship

• Linguistic Exile and Cultural Translation