Translation
Studies Research Focus Group
Conveners:
Suzanne Jill Levine, Spanish and Portuguese, sjlevine@spanport.ucsb.edu
Yunte Huang, English, yhuang@english.ucsb.edu
Statement of Purpose
The Translation Studies Research Focus Group investigates
the various issues surrounding translation, especially
but not limited to scholarly work with translation.
This includes the practical problems encountered in
the process of translation?translating an author’s
unique style, translating culturally specific idiomatic
expressions and slang, remaining “loyal” to original works, to name a few--and stems to theoretical
problems--questions of authorship and originality; the
impact of translation on cultural understanding; and
the problem of what is lost and what is gained when
bringing a text into another language. The group will
take up such problems through shared work, presentations
from active and well-known translators, and ongoing
discussion. In addition, the group is interested in
scholarship in the field of translation studies and
promotes the publication of translations and critical
writing about translation (as can be found in the groups
upcoming journal, Translation).
Spring 2007
Thursday, April 26, 3:30pm GIRVETZ 2116:
"Borges in/and Translation," a talk by Willis Barnstone (Comparative Literature, Indiana University, Bloomington)
Professor Barnstone will read and comment on his translations of Borges's poetry as part of a dialogue with Professor Suzanne Jill Levine on the life and works of this important Argentine literary figure.
Willis Barnstone, distinguished poet and translator from many languages, and author of With Borges on an Ordinary Evening in Buenos Aires , was born in Lewiston , Maine , and educated at Bowdoin, Columbia , and Yale. He taught in Greece at the end of the civil war (1949-51), in Buenos Aires during the Dirty War, and during the Cultural Revolution went to China , where he was later a Fulbright Professor of American Literature at Beijing Foreign Studies University (1984-1985). His publications include Modern European Poetry (Bantam, 1967), The Other Bible (HarperCollins, 1984) The Secret Reader: 501 Sonnets (New England, 1996), a memoir biography With Borges on an Ordinary Evening in Buenos Aires ( Illinois , 1993), and To Touch the Sky (New Directions, 1999). His literary translation of the New Testament The New Covenant: The Four Gospels and Apocalypse was published by Riverhead Books in 2002. A Guggenheim Fellow and Pulitzer Prize finalist in poetry, Barnstone is Distinguished Professor at Indiana University.
Sponsored by the IHC's Translation Studies Research Focus Group, the Spanish & Portuguese Department and the College of Creative Studies
Fall 2006
Friday, October 13, 3pm IHC RESEARCH SEMINAR ROOM, 6056 HSSB:
TSRFG Planning Meeting
New and old members of the group as well as all interested students and faculty are invited to our first meeting of the year to discuss our events for 2006/2007. Please come with ideas for potential speakers, workshops, discussions, or other projects you would like the group to take on in the future.
Tuesday, October 31, 3pm WOFSY SEMINAR ROOM, 4312 Phelps Hall:
"Infante's Havana," a talk by Enrico Mario Santi (Univ. of Kentucky)
Prof. Santi, who is currently preparing an annotated edition of one of the
major Boom novels Three Trapped Tigers (1965), will present his research on
the great 20th century Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Santi interviewed and worked with the exiled author extensively before his unfortunate death in London, February 2005.
Enrico Mario Santi, is the William T. Bryan Professor of Hispanic Studies
at the University Of Kentucky. He is a former Guggenheim Fellow and the
author of eight books. Prof. Santi is now working on a critical edition of
Cabrera Infante's Tres Tristes Tigres..
The event is sponsored by the IHC's Translation Studies RFG, the
College of Creative Studies, and the Spanish and Portuguese Department.
Monday, November 20, 3pm, IHC RESEARCH SEMINAR ROOM, 6056 HSSB:
Elide Valarini Oliver, Professor in Spanish and Portuguese at UCSB, will be presenting her work in the translation of Francois Rabelais into Portuguese. The presentation will lead to a discussion of the tasks of translation more generally.
Professor Oliver has translated for the Portuguese, among others, O Terceiro Livro das Aventuras de Pantagruel by François Rabelais (São Paulo, Ateliê Editorial, forthcoming), annotated edition with critical and linguistic comments; A Canção dos Loureiros by Édouard du Jardin (Rio de Janeiro, Globo, 1989); Aurélia, by Gérard de Nerval (São Paulo, Icone, 1986); works by Swift, Hawthorne, Flann O'Brien, poetry by T.S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney, Nerval, Baudelaire, Larkin, among others.
Tuesday, December 5 (time and place TBA):
"Delito por bailar el cha-cha-cha: Text and Counterfeit."
Latin Americanist Prof. Alfred MacAdam will present his talk for the Translation Studies Research Focus group as well as the Latin American Research Seminar (Span 294A).
Professor Mac Adam's area of specialization is Latin American literature of the 20th century. His most recent book, Textual Confrontations: Comparative Readings in Latin American Literature (University of Chicago Press, 1986) brings together writing from the Spanish-speaking and English-speaking worlds in order to discover common denominators and cultural divergences.
Professor Mac Adam is the editor of Review: Latin American Literature and Arts, a publication of the Americas Society. He is also a translator of contemporary Spanish American fiction, especially of Carlos Fuentes.
Translation Studies Research Focus Group, Spring 2006
See here for information about our May conference: Conference Page
Translation Studies Research Focus Group Calendar, Winter 2006
Wednesday, January 18 / 4:00 PM
TALK: Jewish Myth and Contemporary Fiction
Presenter: Mark Jay Mirsky (Department of English, City University of New York)
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB
Does “Jewish myth” exist apart from “Biblical myth”? What characteristics of this “Jewish myth” might found in the fiction of Robert Musil, Flann O'Brien, Harold Brodkey, Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz, Jorge Luis Borges and Cynthia Ozick? Are Jewish and Christian myth so entangled that it is impossible to speak separately about them?
Mark Jay Mirsky, a writer and founder and editor of Fiction Magazine, is Professor of English at City College of New York. His books include Diaries: Robert Musil 1899-1942; Dante, Eros, and Kabbalah; My Search for the Messiah: Studies and Wanderings in Israel and America; Blue Hill Avenue: A Novel; The Red Adam; and Absent Shakespeare. He co-edited with David Stern, Rabbinic Fantasies: Imaginative Narratives from Classical Hebrew Literature. Mirsky received his B.A. from Harvard University and M.A. from Stanford University.
Sponsored by: The Herman P. and Sophia Taubman Foundation Endowed Symposia in Jewish Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, a program of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, and co-sponsored by the IHC Translation Studies Research Focus Group
Friday, February 10 / 12:00 PM
TALK: Recovering Pleasure: Searching for Libido in Two Languages
Presenter: Bruce Benderson
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB
Author Bruce Benderson will discuss his book The Romanian: Story of an Obsession, for which he won the Prix de Flore in 2004. In his memoir, Benderson recounts the experience of meeting a homeless Romanian in Manhattan's gay community and following him to Bucharest, where homosexuality was illegal. Reflecting upon the significance this journey to his writing, lifestyle and identity, the author will also discuss the event of winning the Prix de Flore which placed his book in new Latin/Catholic context, as well as the differences between its French and Anglo-Saxon receptions.
Bruce Benderson has worked as a journalist for numerous American and French publications, including The New York Times Magazine, The Village Voice, The Stranger, Libération, and Actuel. In November 2004, he was the first American to receive the prestigious French literary prize, the Prix de Flore for Autobiographie érotique (Rivages) (to be released in February 2006 by Penguin/Tarcher under the title The Romanian: Story of an Obsession). He is also a translator of French literature, the author of two fictional works, User (Dutton), Pretending to Say No (Plume), and of several works of non-fiction, Toward the New Degeneracy (Edgewise), Sexe et solitude (Payot) and James Bidgood (Taschen).
Sponsored by: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, & Transgender Resources; Translation Studies Research Focus Group
Friday, February 24 / 12:00 PM
TALK: Translating Convent Life, From Rapture to the Quotidian
Presenter: Amanda Powell (Dept. of Romance Languages, U. of Oregon)
Wofsy Seminar Room, Phelps 4312
What were the contexts and audiences for an outpouring of writings by Spanish and colonial Latin American nuns in the 16th and 17th centuries? How bring their life stories, poems, visions, and letters to view for 21st-century, English-speaking readers, who often “know” a great deal about convent life that is untrue or incomplete?
Amanda Powell is a professor of Spanish literature at the University of Oregon. Her translations include Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works (U. New Mexico, 1989; 2nd edition forthcoming, U. Chicago, The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe series); Juana Inés de la Cruz, The Answer/La respuesta (Feminist Press, 1994); A Wild Country Out in the Garden: The Spiritual Journals of a Colonial Mexican Nun (Indiana U., 1999); and María de San José Salazar, Book for the Hour of Recreation (U. Chicago, 2000).
Sponsored by: Latin American and Iberian Studies, The Department of Spanish and Portuguese, The College of Creative Studies, The Translation Studies Research Focus Group
Tuesday, March 7 / 2:00 PM
READING: Migrations/Migraciones
Poetry Reading and Discussion in Spanish and English
Presenters: Gloria Gervitz and Mark Schafer
Sterling Morton West Gallery, Santa Barbara Museum of Art
Gloria Gervitz, one of the most important Mexican poets of the post-Paz generation, will present her book-length poem Migraciones in bilingual readings with her translator, Mark Schafer. Migraciones is at times frankly and lushly erotic in the tradition of both Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the 17th-century mother of all post-conquest Mexican poetry in Spanish, and of modern Mexican feminism. It is, as Jerome Rothenberg has said, “an epic of the migratory self,” an almost thirty-year journey of the nomadic spirit, and an ecstatic arrival.
Mark Schafer has given us a translation, itself the work of thirteen years, worthy of the original-a profound meditation on the text that stands as an extended lyric in its own right. His thoughtful conversation with Gervitz follows the poem.
Sponsored by: The IHC's Translation Studies Research Focus Group and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. This reading was co-sponsored by
the Consulate General of Mexico in San Diego and San Francisco and by the Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores of Mexico.
Translation Studies Research Focus Group Calendar, Fall 2005
-2005/06 Inaugural Meeting, Thursday October 6, HSSB
6056, noon-1:30
-Sanskrit Translator David Nelson (Devadatta Kali), "In Praise of the Goddess of Translation," Friday October 28, HSSB 6056, 12:45-2:15
-"Palomas or Doves: Translating a Duo with Carol
Maier and Suzanne Jill Levine," Thursday November
17, HSSB 6056,
4:30-5:30
Information
Contact summer_star@umail.ucsb.edu for more information.
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