The Role Translations Play In The Interpretation And Consecration Of Literature

By Author: mark
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Evaluations of competing translations require the closest of readings. At the same time, just as significantly, they force us to stand back with our new knowledge and consider, at a remove, the literature that we traditionally read and teach. The study of translation, when done right, can debunk the myth of a text's unchanging identity by inviting us to consider how its complex, multiple, and Replica Tag Heuer often international or intralinguistic origins are often palimpsested through multiple translations. Reading translations entails the kind of truffle hunting required for close reading, but also the use of a wider optic, one that allows us to sight what Terry Eagleton argues is "held at bay" by the practice of reading great works of literature "in isolation" .

Universities across the country have incorporated courses and programs in translation studies in a variety of ways. Surveying these courses and programs, we have found everything from introductory courses in theory to workshops, certificate programs, and full degree programs. The goals of such courses ...
... run from the purely pragmatic (translator training) to the purely theoretical. Our course was offered as a cross-listed undergraduate/graduate course with the following catalogue description: This course offers an introduction to the history of translation practices through a study of critical essays from Jerome and Dryden to Benjamin and Derrida, as well as comparative analysis of English-language translations. Class time will be divided between analysis of theoretical writing and evaluative discussion of competing English-language translations. This course will demonstrate that the history of English literature would have been different, if not impossible, without the efforts of countless translators, many of them anonymous. One of the goals of Replica Omega the course is to make students aware of central issues in the burgeoning field of translation studies, including the social and economic factors that come into play whenever we ferry texts between languages, cultures, and eras. The methods and procedures that we study will lead to discussions about gender, poetics, ideology, class, and nation. We will devote particular attention to the changing valences of the key concept of equivalence. Over the course of the semester we will explore the practice and consequences of literary translation, learning about the role translations play in the interpretation and consecration of literature.

And the other half graduate students, primarily from the PhD, MA, and MFA programs in English. Essays from The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Venuti, anchored the course with weekly theory readings ranging from Jerome to Jacques Derrida. As outlined in the syllabus, assignments included a twenty-minute presentation on a specific translation or cluster of translations, a midterm examination requiring a comparative evaluation of three translations of Sappho, a six-page mid-semester paper on Walter Benjamin and John Keats's poem "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," and a final project, to be drawn up in concert with the professor.