ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

What or who gets lost when we translate poetry of national, ethnic, or cultural others or poetry that is other? What or who gets found? In the end, is translating poetry always intransitive? Is it always other, which is to say something else than the writer’s, reader’s, and translator’s intents or interpretations? This panel seeks to explore questions of translating poetry: on the one hand the phrase describes poetry which translates its own otherness while at the same time translating experiences of l’étranger (e.g. cultural) from other to another, or from opposition to apposition as Édouard Glissant would say. On the other hand, the phrase describes the event of translating poetry as a poetry in its own right. We welcome papers which address translating the poetry of “the Other,” whether cultural, linguistic, or another historic era; comparative translations of a poem; poems about bodily or spiritual translation; poems that translate prose or vice versa, and other relevant topics. Original translations are encouraged for those papers that address works not written in English.

Friday, March 24

Marcela Sulak, American University
“Surveying the Boundaries of a Literary World: Translating Culturally and Politically Significant Poetic Structures”
Richard House, University of East Anglia
“On representation: the ‘local’ and the ‘international’”
Richard Newman, Nassau Community College
“Translation as Decolonization: Retranslating Classical Persian Poetry for a Contemporary Audience”
Brandon Lussier, Hamline University
“Estonian Soil & Estonian Heart: Emphasized Otherness in the Translation of Estonian Poetry”

Saturday, March 25

Rachel MagShamhrain, Trinity College, Dublin
“Translating Kleist’s Die Herrmannsschlacht”
John Hicks, Cornell University
“Translation as Anti-Poetic Method: Laura Riding’s The Life of the Dead (1933)”
Benzi Zhang, Chinese University of Hong Kong
“‘The Other’ in the Mirror: Chinese Diaspora Poetry and Cultural Self-translation”

Sunday, March 26

Jon Readey, University of Virginia
“Orientalism through Imagism: Hybridity in Ezra Pound’s Translations as a Metaphor for Modernist Cultural Imperialism”
Seanna Sumalee Oakley, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
“‘The horizon devours my voice’: Translating Franketienne’s Translative Poetry”
Fayeza Hasanat, University of Central Florida
“Veiling Translation”
Saud Al-Zaid, University of Chicago
“Marvelous Bridges: The Exegetical Rhetoric of Sayyid Qutb and Ibn Arabi”