Profile

COLT 613 Translation Pedagogy

• Disciplines across the university—including history, philosophy, anthropology, comparative literature, and even "national" literature departments—are constantly encountering the problem of translation, since key texts are often taught in translation, particularly at the undergraduate level. Yet few of us, from first-year undergraduates to senior professors, have been trained to discuss translated materials as translations. If each translation embodies a particular interpretation of an original, how does this affect our own work of interpretation as we engage critically with texts in translation? Can, or should, we perform close readings of translations as if they were "originals"? What is an "original," anyhow? How is translation similar to and distinct from other forms of rewriting, such as edition-making, anthologization, and literary criticism? This course tackles such questions head-on, on the premise that a nuanced understanding of the problem of translation is essential for the responsible teaching of texts in translation. The course will deploy both theoretical and practical approaches: we will study theories of translation, but will also work collaboratively on issues arising in the classroom.

COLT 399 Special Studies: Translation Theory

• This course offers a diachronic overview of key approaches to translation encountered primarily in Anglophone and Western European traditions, with an emphasis on literary translation. Bringing together texts from disciplines including linguistics, anthropology, philosophy, and literary criticism, the course both traces the development of notions such as "faithful" and "free," "word-for-word" and "sense-for-sense," "foreignizing" and "domesticating," and challenges students to move beyond these terms and the understandings of translation they imply. We will consider the interpretive nature of the translator's task, the politics and the ethics of translation, and the role translation plays in the formation, re-formation, or deformation of national and international literary canons. Authors on the syllabus include Friedrich Schleiermacher, Walter Benjamin, Roman Jakobson, George Steiner, Eugene Nida, Andre Lefevere, Antoine Berman, Douglas Robinson, Gayatri Spivak, Lori Chamberlain, and Lawrence Venuti.

COLT 440/540 Studies in Genre: "Radical Poetics, Radical Translation"

• This course investigates genre by looking at poetics in some of its most radical forms: it examines modes of poetic composition that challenge the limits of the translatable, as well as radical translation methods that expand our notion of what both poetry and translation are. We will consider the problem of textual instability, visual/material texts, oral texts, and "illegible" texts. We will also ask how translation tries to rise to the particular challenges such texts present, and will address modes of translation that work in similarly experimental ways: erasure as translation, irreverent translations, visual translations, homophonic translations, and the use of what Lawrence Venuti refers to as "stylistic analogues." Poets/translators/poet-translators on the syllabus include Emily Dickinson, Stéphane Mallarmé, C. P. Cavafy, Antonia Pozzi, Ezra Pound, Louis and Celia Zukofsky, Jack Spicer, Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, Jerome Rothenberg, David Melnick, Susan Howe, and Jen Bervin. While the course focuses largely on trends in modern and contemporary American poetry and English-language translation, students are encouraged to enrich the syllabus with material from the foreign-language traditions with which they are familiar.