Spring 2025
Prereq: none
Units: 2-0-4 Can be repeated for credit
(Second Half Term: Starts Mar 31) In this subject we’ll work with literary texts, chiefly poems. We will read theories of translation (Is it possible? Is it necessary-but-undesirable? Is it even ethical? Is it imperialistic or politically-charged? Is it more like paraphrase or transformation or musical-performance?). We will do comparisons of texts-in-their-original languages and texts-in-translation, and will try some translations and “versions” ourselves. We will consider whether transferring from one medium or genre (e.g., a poem or a novel) to another (e.g., film, opera) is a mode of “translation”—and also what to do when a text is considered sacred (what happens when we translate the Bible?) Or when a machine does the work? Or when a language is historically compromised (how does a Jewish writer use German after the Shoah?).
No other languages-competence except in English is required (we can discuss the processes and theories of “translating” texts from languages one doesn’t know); students who do know other languages, however, are welcome.
Theorists include Walter Benjamin, Benjamin Whorf, Nancy Chodorow, George Steiner, Jon Felstiner, William Gass. Artists whose work we’ll read include Basho, Li Bai, Ezra Pound, Xu Zhimo, Lam Thi My Da, Ngo Tu Lap, Cesar Vallejo, Robert Frost, Dante, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Rainer Maria Rilke, Pablo Neruda, Gabriela Mistral, Paul Celan, Czeslaw Milosz, Wislawa Szymborska, Aimé Césaire, Samuel Beckett, Constantine Cavafy, Robert Lowell, Charlie Chaplin… and probably others. [Pre-1900]