The Art of Translation

0-3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

What’s at stake in the art of translation? Is it an act of faith in a sacred, original word, or can it represent a human bravura for shifting meanings from one context to another? Does it reflect our ability to fully understand each other, despite our different cultures and histories, or is it a painful reminder of our ultimate incommensurability? This course traces theories and debates regarding the art of translation from Roman orators and practitioners including, for example, Saint Jerome (395 AD), depicted in a 17th-century painting by Caravaggio, who addresses the difference between sacred and secular translation, to Antonio Prete, the contemporary Italian poet, philosopher, and translator who considers translation an act of love. We place this extensive Italian tradition in dialogue with other European writers, translators, and philosophers, including John Dryden (1680), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, (1819), and Walter Benjamin (1923). While we begin the course with an Italian and European genealogy of translation, we address a simultaneous US and Latin American tradition, from Hernán Cortés’ early 16th-century translator, La Malinche, and the Incan Emperor, Atahualpa, to William Carlos Williams and his translation of baroque poetry. We consider Langston Hughes’s translations of Nicolás Guillén’s negritude and Gabriela Mistral’s queer poetics and maternal scenes, to translation as a form of intergenerational memory and survival for Originary peoples throughout the Americas. In addition to engaging with theories and practices of translation, students will choose a short story or a series of poems to translate from any language. We will workshop their translations throughout the course with the purpose of publishing them at the end of the semester. Along with the translations, each student will write essays that dialogue with the theories we’ve read and explain decisions involved in their own art of translation.