ENGH 608: Craft Seminars

Some competence in a language other than English preferred.  This can be a fraught question. To name a few examples: some speak another language fluently, but don't read or write it, some have a few years of high-school language, and some can read in a language but not speak it. All of these skill levels have potential for this course. My approach here is that, during the first half, we'll all work on common texts with word-for-word translations provided. In the second half of the term, you will develop a project appropriate to your language skills and interests. This translation work may end up being an exploration of your relationship to another language, and that might be a topic of another piece of writing you produce in the class. If you’re unsure about your language skills, please contact me.

Tentative Reading List:

Kitchen Table Translation, Ed. Madhu Khaza

Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries, Eds. Martha Collins and Kevin Prufer

Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei (with More Ways), Eliot Weinberger

Translating Literature: Practice and Theory in a Comparative Literature Context, by André Lefevere 

The Translation Studies Reader (3rd Edition), Ed. Lawrence Venuti

Course Description:

This course is designed for writers, of both poetry and prose, who seek a better understanding of the theory and practice of literary translation. We’ll read essays about translation from St. Jerome, Jorje Luis Borges, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Anne Carson, and many others. We’ll ask, as Kate Briggs does, in her book-length essay on translation, This Little Art, “What is it about this activity, in its difference from single-handed original authorship—the way it complicates the authorial position: sharing it, usurping it, sort of dislocating it.” We’ll hear from a series of speakers: working translators discussing the practice of their art and craft.

As Edith Grossman writes in her book, Why Translation Matters, translation “permits us to savor the transformation of the foreign into the familiar and for a brief time to live outside our own skins, our own preconceptions and misconceptions.” The study and practice of translation require a profound engagement with a source text’s culture and language, a nuanced critical reading and interpretation of the source work of literature, and a creative application of all the elements of linguistic possibility in the new language. Translation is a vehicle with which to explore the full range of possibilities for meaning-making in language. We’ll consider translation as connection, as conquest, as a tool for empowerment, as a global conversation, as linguistic cross-pollination, as impossible, and as a world of possibility.

For the first part of the semester, students will create and discuss translations--from a variety of languages--based on prepared prompts. We’ll enjoy lectures from working translators, and students will lead discussions on assigned reading material. During the last six weeks of the semester, we’ll continue to read and discuss theoretical texts, and each student will develop their own translation project. We will workshop these projects as they progress.

Credits: 3