Translation is a practice of attention to the mystery at language's core: the gap between words and the things they signify, between one linguistic model of reality and another. When we translate, we confront the ways in which language structures power, meaning, and experience. Translation becomes a generative framework from which to understand the demands and tradeoffs of a globalized world.
This seminar will explore the attentional contours of translation across three sessions, dedicated to questions of ethics, aesthetics, and practice. In the first session, we will consider translation's role in shaping global geographies of "center" and "periphery," and the hierarchies of attention these linguistic cosmologies entail. In the second session, we will ponder the troubled link between the letter and the spirit of a text, viewing attention to each as a primordial translative choice.
In the final session, we will draw on previous conversations to stage our own translations of short literary texts. Participants may translate from a foreign language or a rare English form/dialect; bilingualism is not required. We will wrap up by discussing the practice of translation in relation to the rise of machine-mediated works: Do tech-based translation tools aid or hinder our capacity for translative attention? Can machines pay attention to literary texts? How might this all impact the future of translation—and of human translators themselves?
Taught by Argentine writer and translator Josefina Massot.