Bread Loaf Translators' Lecture and Class Examples

Lectures

Susan Bernofsky, “Finding a Language for the Past”

How can we mark the language of our translations to reflect the age of the works we are translating, and why should we want to? A discussion of techniques for translating older works/works set in the past and the rationale behind them.

Maureen Freely, “Where I Go, When I Look Like I’m Translating a Book”

Translation is an exacting, and often punishing, art.  So why do I do it?  Why am I willing to spend long hours grappling with words and thoughts for which English has no equivalents, when I could be writing whatever I wanted, under my own name?  

The short answer is that it allows me to transgress.  It ushers me into a world that has fascinated (and excluded) me since childhood.  It takes me through a story that is already fully formed, to set my imagination free.  

The long answer is more complicated, and best left to the lecture.

Karen Emmerich, “Translating Otherwise: Mistakes, Margins, Experiments”

Most translators translate safely: we stick to dictionary definitions, and hew even to ideas of how texts mean that have been consolidated by time-honored traditions of reading and interpretation. Some translators, however, go out on very different limbs, investigating the margins of texts and engaging in their own marginal forms of experimental translation. This talk will present some examples of translators who translate otherwise, as extreme models that might help us spice up even our own more conventional modes of approaching the translator’s task.



Geoffrey Brock, “Case Studies in Imitation”

This talk will discuss literary imitation and its relation to translation by focusing primarily on two examples, one from the sixteenth century and one from the twentieth. I’ll look first at “Whoso List to Hunt” by Thomas Wyatt, who introduced the sonnet into English with his translations and adaptations of Petrarch’s sonnets, and then I’ll discuss César Vallejo’s “Piedra negra sobre una piedra blanca,” which adapts a little-known poem by the Swiss poet Henry Spiess and which has itself been imitated by Donald Justice and many others. 

Esther Allen, “Temporality in Translation: the case of Antonio Di Benedetto’s Zama”

First published in Argentina in 1956, Zama encompasses a multitude of belatedness. The novel, which is set in the late 18th century, had only a kind of cult following until after Di Benedetto’s death in 1986. In the years since, it has grown in prominence to such a degree that the 50th anniversary of its publication was the focus of a week-long celebration in Buenos Aires. And though Zama was translated into German, Italian and Polish during Di Benedetto’s lifetime, its first translation into English (which I’ve been working on for the past five years) will only, finally, be published in August of this year.  Its reception in English, however, has been heralded since 2006 by Roberto Bolaño’s story “Sensini,” which is about Di Benedetto, and in which Zama appears in the guise of a novel by Sensini titled Uguarte.

How could it have taken five years to translate a book whose author claimed it was written in a month? What are the differences between making a first translation of a new novel, whatever degree of success it enjoyed on first publication, and making the first translation of a novel that time (and Roberto Bolaño) have already consecrated as a classic? And what does a translator learn when the translation process is slowed down to such a degree? Zama is a meditation on time, and translating it made me think about translation and time: both how timing impacts a translation, and the benefits and perils of a long and meditative process.

Suzanne Jill Levine, “Borges on Translation, or the Reader as Writer”

For the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, translation and (as he put it) “direct” writing have only one small difference: unlike an original, a translation can be judged against another text. Like the ancient Latin poets Borges also saw translation as a poetics and a writerly rite of passage, as part and parcel of the act of writing. Whether in the form of essays, prologues, reviews, fictions or poems, his thinking about literary translation is illuminating, and in nearly every text he wrote from the 1920s to the 1980s, translation is in some way present. In my lecture I would like to share his thoughts in four or five texts he explicitly dedicated to the fine are of literary translation, to wit: “The Two Ways to Translate” (1926), “The Homeric Versions” (1932), “The Translators of the 1001 Nights” (1936), and “The Enigma of Edward Fitzgerald” (1951) as well as his noted (and first) work of fiction, “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote” (1939).



Christopher Merrill, “Corrective Readings: Translation in the Age of Trump”

What is the translator’s role in the Age of Trump? How should we calibrate our reading, writing, and translating in the face of America First sloganeering? Where shall we turn for the complicated truths that will survive claims of fake news? These are the sorts of questions I will explore in a meditation on translated works by Eugenio Montale, Anna Akhmatova, Czeslaw Milosz, and others.

Craft Classes

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita: An Experiment,

with Don Share                                                                                              

Most discussions of translation focus on the relationship between the translator and his or her source material.  But this approach suggests that an author’s intention, and that of the translator, can be articulated and judged; but this approach has, as Russell Scott Valentino recently put it, “little patience with polyvalence.”    So what will happen when, as an experiment, we work as a group toward the interpretation and translation of a very well-known text?   No knowledge of Italian necessary!

Translating Dialogue for the Stage, with Bill Johnston                             

In this craft class we’ll work on ways of creating speakable, natural-sounding dialogue when translating drama.

Translation Heresies, with Christopher Merrill



Although W. H. Auden thought it was best to translate from languages one does not know, common sense suggests that the practice is indefensible—except when the alternative is either silence or a wooden translation that brings none of the energy of the original into the target language. In this class, we will examine this thorny proposition through a consideration of W.S. Merwin’s translations from languages he knows and languages he does not.



Translating from a Distant Language, with Maureen Freely     



If translation into English from the great European languages is fraught with difficulties, it must in part have to do with their being closely related.  This is one problem that we who translate from non-Western languages do not have. In this craft class, we shall work together to take several short passages from Turkish into English, with a view to better understanding what it means to translate the thoughts beyond the words, as well as the words themselves.