ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

Arguably what makes us human is verbal, certainly written language. The need for translation reveals both the universality of linguistic communication among humans, and the differences separating languages and cultures. As a crucial communication tool, translation requires the translator’s invisibility, yet literary translation is often the opposite, a transformation of the original text that allows the translator to find his/her own voice as a writer. Furthermore, the metamorphosis of the original text into another language sometimes creates a new and “better” writer–Baudelaire’s Poe being a case in point. Issues discussed in the proposed two-day panel include translating as a bridge between writing and reading (cf. Proust on the writer as translator); the family romance of translation (translation as filial labor of love, yet also the locus of appropriation, misreading and oedipal conflict); translation as illustration of the original.

Friday, March 24

Susan Bernofsky, Bard College
“Lessing and Goethe translating Diderot”
Emily Apter, NYU
“Eleanor Marx’s translation of Madame Bovary”
Dominique Jullien, UCSB
“Mardrus, translator and/or illustrator of The 1001 Nights”
Kelly Austin, University of Chicago
“John Felstiner’s Translating Neruda”

Saturday, March 25

Bella Brodzki, Sarah Lawrence College
“English and French translations of Amos Oz’s ‘The Tale of Love and darkness’”
Serge Gavronsky, Barnard College
“The Naturalization of Louis Zukofsky in France”
Alison James, University of Chicago
“Georges Perec, Harry Mathews: Oulipian translation”
Ryan Kernan, UCLA
“Langston Hughes translating Nicolás Guillén and García Lorca”
Jill Levine, UCSB, Respondent