Translation Studies Colloquium (winter 2017)

Friday, March 10, 2017       3:00-5:00 p.m.              HEDCO 144

Light refreshments

Reports from award recipients: 
Sheela Hadjivassiliou,  “Trauma, Testimony and Triumph”

In Ananda Devi’s Le Sari vert, three generations of women bear witness to their respective experiences of trauma through the first person narration of their abuser.  In my translation of Devi’s novel, I seek to transmit the “protagonist’s” darkly compelling story–one that elicits unwilling sympathy even as it horrifies–while still privileging the voices of the women he victimizes and whose stories of redemption and healing the novel is ultimately telling.

Elizabeth Howard (via Skype) “James Macpherson and the Ghost of Scottish Highland Culture”

James Macpherson’s cycle of Ossian poems occupy a fraught position in Scotland’s literary history due to the contested nature of their status as translations from a lost oral literary tradition. My project examines the complicated status of the poems as translations by looking in particular at the spirituality conveyed in the poems, specifically through the figure of the ghost.

Colloquium presentations:

Maya Larson   (Peter Ward respondent)

“Secret Freedom, Sovereign Verse: Translating Varlam Shalamov’s Essay on the National Borders of Poetry”

Apparently unpublished during his lifetime but perhaps circulated clandestinely as samizdat, Soviet gulag survivor Varlam Shalamov’s 1963 essay “The National Borders of Poetry and Free Verse” deploys poetic techniques that invite its lines to be read between. My translation interprets Shalamov’s essay as an Aesopian text, by using multiple English words for single multivalenced Russian words; by refusing to edit out lengthy quotations and other passages that appear to digress from the essay’s explicit focus; and by offering contextual translations of these quoted works that interpret these quotations as allusive, coded references woven into the meaning of Shalamov’s essay.

Paul Kaveney (Ying Xiong respondent)

Trials of Translating Transvestism: Castaño’s Monologue in Sor Juana’s Los empeños de una casa

The transvestism scene in Sor Juana’s play Los empeños de una casa is a pivotal moment that sheds as much light on the role of the gracioso in Baroque comedia as much as it does on Sor Juana’s subversion of the stock character’s role. She uses him to reflect upon, satirize, and criticize gender roles and performance in a manner that had not been attempted before, a strategy made all the more unique by the fact that the playwright was a perspicacious and intelligent woman known for her critique of men’s treatment of women. My presentation will focus on the process of translating the gender politics that abound in Castaño’s transvestism scene while maintaining the light-hearted character of the Baroque gracioso.