TRANSLATION AS LITERARY EXPERIMENT

Hear ye, hear ye: Panel discussion on “Translation as Literary Experiment” with Anne Cheng, Stéphane Feuillas, Judith Zeitlin, Jennifer Scappettone, Rachel Galvin, Michael Bourdaghs, Haun Saussy, and Brook Ziporyn

Thursday, April 12

1:00 pm, Classics 110, University of Chicago

Translation, we often think, owes a responsibility to the past— to the already-written text that is being recreated in a new language. But translation also has been known to permit experiment in the language of arrival: to say what has gone unsaid, to try out broken idioms, to give free rein to fantasies of otherness, to imagine ruptures with the present. And there is a venerable tradition of original works being presented to a suspicious public under the cover of “translation” (when there was in fact no original to translate). In coordination with the visits of Anne Cheng (Collège de France) and Stéphane Feuillas (Université de Paris - Diderot), a group of translators and theorists of translation has been assembled to seek collective insight into the future-facing, precedent-breaking aspects of translation into various languages.