1
Pu Wang
Assistant Professor, GRALL and EAS
Seminar Proposal for M.A.C.H
Seminar Title:
The Problem of Translation: History and Theory
Course Description:
This seminar aims to examine the history and theory of translation from a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective. An essential aspect of the trans-lingual and cross-cultural experience throughout human history, translation embodies our cultural-political existence in the age of globalization, and figures prominently as a crucial issue in today’s humanities. This seminar is thus concerned with the following questions: how was translation practiced and theorized in and between different civilizations and languages during different periods of history? What are the literary, intellectual and ethical encounters and tensions involvedin such trans-lingual or trans-national practices? What are thecultural-political implications of various modes of translation and their theories? Are we doomed to be “lost in translation?” Is the vision of translatability a fulcrum for“world literature” (Weltliteratur), “international community” and global multiculturalism?After all, what is gained in translation?
The discussion is to be divided into a series of case studies. The potential cases are: translation in the Roman Empire (Cicero); the history of Bible translation (from Saint Jerome through Martin Luther to today’s globalization); translation of the Buddhist sutras in East Asia (Kumārajīva and Xuanzang Monk); translation and Renaissance humanism; German Romantic culture of translation (Goethe, Schleiermach, Hölderlin, and Antoine Berman’s account of them); Ezra Pound and modernist translation; the idea of (un)translatability (Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida); Victorian orientalism, colonial history and post-colonialism in translation (the case of Rubáiyát, Spivak, Brazilian cannibalistic translation); appropriation of Western modernity in China via Japanese sources (Lin Shu, Lu Xun and indirect translation); feminist critique of translation;etc.
These cases will throw us into a constant experience of border crossing and force us to confront the following paradoxes: foreignization vs. domestication; literalism vs. fluency; authenticity vs. misreading; origin vs. influence; fidelity vs. creativity; authority (“copyright”) of the author vs. subjectivity (activism) of the translator; etc.
If conditions permit, we can also try to invite some famous translators and translation scholars based in Northeast region (such as Richard Sieburth or Lydia Liu) to lecture in our class.
Readings will be in English. We must do trans-lingual comparison or cross-reference when dealing with concrete examples of translation, and students are also encouraged to engage in multi-lingual research. But when a passage in a foreign language appears, we will provide or work out an English translation for the class. In other words, this seminar is bound tobe a collective experience of translation, too.
Every student is supposed to find his/her own project or case study in the middle of the semester, present his/her work-in-progress, and eventually write a research paper.
Textbook:
The Translation Studies Reader. Third Edition. Edited by Lawrence Venuti. Routledge, 2012.
All other readings will be provided as pdf files.
Weekly schedule with readings(subject to change by collective decisions):
Week 1 (Jan. 14) and week 2 (Jan. 21): Introduction and the tropes of translation
Chamberlain, "Gender & the Metaphorics of Translation," in Venuti, Translation Studies Reader
Johnson, "Taking Fidelity Philosophically," in Graham, Difference in Translation
*Robinson, "The Tropics of Translation," "The Ethics of Translation," in The Translator's Turn
*Steiner, After Babel (passim)
Week 3 (Jan. 28): Religion and translation: Translating the Bible
Seidman, Faithful Renderings, Intro, Chapts 1-3
Robinson, "The Ascetic Foundations of Modern Translatogy: Jerome & Augustine"
Week 4 (Feb. 4): Renaissance and translation
- Excerpts from Cicero, Bruni, Valla
- Erasmus, “Translation Letters”
- Petrarch, Familiares (sel.) and selections from Rime Sparse
- Ronsard, Quevedo, Wyatt, etc.
Week 5 (Feb. 11):The German tradition of translation 1: hermeneutics and Bildung
Schleiermacher, “On the Different Methods of Translating”
Antoine Berman,The Experience of the Foreign
Week 6 (midterm recess, no class)
Week 7 (Feb. 25): The German tradition of translation 2: Holderlin and radical literalism
Antoine Berman: The Experience of the Foreign
Week 8 (Mar. 4) and Week 9 (Mar. 11): Translatability, untranslatability
Walter Benjamin: “The Task of the Translator”
Paul de Man: “Benjamin’s ‘Task’”
Excerpts from Sam Weber: Benjamin’s -abilities
Derrida: “Des Tours de Babel”
Excerpts from Emily Apter: Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability
Case study: Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon. Edited by Barbara Cassin; translation edited by Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra & Michael Wood
Week 10 (Mar. 18): Translation, empire, orientalism
The case of Rubáiyát in English
Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, chapter 2
Excerpts from Lydia H. Liu, The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making
Week 11 (Mar. 25): Western literary modernity and translation: the case of Ezra Pound
Pound, “Guido’s Relations”
Case study: Pound and classical Chinese and Japanese literature
Week 12 (Apr. 1): Postcolonialism and translation
Spivak, “The Politics of Translation”
Vieira, “Literating Calibans: Readings of Antropofagia and Haroldo de Campos’ Poetics of Transcreation.”
Week 13 (Apr. 8): Other translation tradition: the case of modern China
Excerpts from Leo Chan ed., Twentieth-Century Chinese Translation Theory: Modes, Issues and Debates
Pu Wang, “The Promethean translator and cannibalistic pains: Lu Xun's “hard translation” as a political allegory”
Week 14 (Passover and spring recess, no class)
Week 15 (Apr. 22): International revolution and global capitalism
The concept of Weltliteratur and the ongoing debate:David Damrosch, Emily Apter, Aijaz Ahmad.
Case study: the translation of the Communist Manifesto.
Week 16 (Apr. 29):Q and A or reports on works-in-progress