Imagination and Translation: Readings and Voicings from Endangered Languages, Bob Holman

By the end of this century, half the 6500 languages on earth will have disappeared, and with them 3250 different ways of making and defining what we call literature. By looking at the use of structure, rhyme, meter, repetition and mnemonics in epics, tales, chants, riddles, and fables in the disappearing languages of the world, we'll explore new ways of putting together a story or poem, trying out those techniques in English versions and in creating new works of our own imagining. We'll use Jerome Rothenberg's ur text, Technicians of the Sacred, refer to Ong's Orality and Literacy for theoretical underpinnings, and spend time with Papa Susso, a Gambian griot, "Talking Book." Through our translations and responses to Papa Susso's work and that of others, we'll discuss ways that these soon-to-vanish ways of thinking might be documented, maintained, and revived while engaging them to inspire our own writerly imaginations.

Spring Translation Workshop, Michael Scammell

For procedural reasons, this three-hour workshop awards only three credits, but in every other respect it is conducted along similar lines to other workshops, with the same degree of professional rigor, regular submissions, and critiques by both professor and students. It is also the only workshop open to students from all three concentrations: poetry, fiction and nonfiction, and offers a unique opportunity for students to exchange experience across all three disciplines (poets may also choose to translate prose, for example, and prose students poetry).

In the course of the semester we will discuss both the principles and techniques of translation, and consider some of the challenges posed by this particularly literary enterprise, e.g. what might be the pros and cons of literalism, how idiomatic should a translation be, how many of the original's formal qualities should a translator seek to reproduce - especially in poetry? Students will work out their answers through practice and class discussions. They will also discover that close scrutiny of texts and literary structures throws fresh light on their own creative work - students who take the translation workshop rarely see their own work in the same way afterward.

PREREQUISITES: The class will be limited to a maximum of 12 students. Students wishing to take part must demonstrate proficiency in another language at least to intermediate college level before the start of the spring semester (please contact me at ms474@columbia.edu if you are in doubt). This is to ensure that participants choose works of reasonable quality and sufficient interest for translation, and are capable of producing English versions to an acceptable level. The original texts can be from any language, period, or genre.

Modern and Contemporary Russian Poetry in Translation, Matvei Yankelevich

Beginning with the "Silver Age" of Russian Modernism (1890-1920) and the formative years of the new Soviet culture and ending in the present time after the Soviet Union's dissolution (and during the recurrence of oppressive state control under a different flag), this course's topics of discussion will include tradition, form, and experimentation, differences in Russian and European modernism and avant gardes, as well as the relationship of politics to poetic theory and practice. In the years following the turn of the 20th century, decadence mingled with avant-garde imaginations and progressive and radical (even utopian) politics to engender several important artistic movements and aesthetic schools. We'll focus on the three major salon-style groupings that pitted themselves against each other: Symbolism (Bryusov, Balmont, Sologub, Gippius, Blok), Acmeism (Gumilev, Mandelstam, Akhmatova), and Futurism (Khlebnikov, Guro, Kruchenykh), as well as some poets who fall outside these "schools" (Pasternak and Tsvetaeva). We'll follow the development of Akhmatova's and Mandelstam's poetry in response to the disasters of the Stalin regime and look at alternative modernisms (Daniil Kharms, Alexander Vvedensky, Nikolai Zabolotsky, and Boris Poplavsky). We'll trace the various modernist traditions as they went "underground" in the post-war years: The divergent strategies of increasingly marginalized poets, such as Joseph Brodsky and his circle, the poets of the Lianozovo group (Sapgir, Nekrasov, Kholin, Aigi), and dissident poets like Alexander Esenin-Volpin and Natalya Gorbanevskaya). We'll also explore the poetry of the late Soviet period, especially Moscow Conceptualism (Prigov, Rubinstein), Meta-Realism (Eremenko, Parshchikov, Zhdanov) and other post-modernists, including Dragomoshchenko, Sedakova and Shvarts. Throughout, we'll touch upon connections with visual culture, especially as regards Futurist experimentation with typography and book-making, off-the-page poetic action and performance of the 1970s, neo-futurist visual poetry, and important intersections between poetry and modern art. We will also consider the émigré poetry of the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods, with a look at Brodsky's exilic poetry and other émigré authors writing in both native and adopted tongues. Lastly, we'll explore some facets of the many-sided prism that is contemporary Russian poetry, focussing on younger living writers, such as Aleksandr Skidan, Elena Fanailova, Kirill Medvedev, Dmitry Kuzmin, and Andrey Sen-Senkov.

Traditions of Rupture: 20th and 21st Century Latin American Poetries, Mónica de la Torre

In this seminar we will study the work of those seminal authors of the first half of the 20th century who were the first to realize a distinctly Latin American poetry, one owing as much to the European tradition as to Latin America's colonial history and vernacular: Vicente Huidobro, César Vallejo, Pablo Neruda, and Jorge Luis Borges, as well as the Brazilian Modernists Oswald and Mário de Andrade. We will also examine the key representatives of the poetries stemming from the first generation avant-garde-Octavio Paz, José Lezama Lima, and the Brazilian Concrete Poets, among them-as well as the contributions of contemporary poets to the expansion of the field. Contemporary authors studied will include Nicanor Parra, Raúl Zurita, and Diamela Eltit from Chile; Gerardo Deniz, David Huerta, and Coral Bracho from Mexico; José Kozer and Antonio José Ponte from Cuba; and Néstor Perlongher, Osvaldo Lamborghini and Arturo Carrera from Argentina. We will pay special attention to translation issues, multilingualism and orality, appropriation, and the relationship between poetry and visual culture.

Translation Seminar, Idra Novey

In this introductory course to literary translation, students will learn about the art of translating prose and poetry. We will read essays on translation by writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, and Anne Carson, and discuss the benefits and drawbacks of different approaches to the craft. Students will present their own translations for discussion and become familiar with a range of perspectives on literary translation that will inform their revision process. We'll also discuss the way works in translation are reviewed and each student will review a recent translation for the end of the semester.

Translation and Writing Master Class, Matvei Yankelevich

Translation is a perfect metaphor for what happens in the process of putting thoughts into words and reading them back off the page. The practice of translation brings out our hidden prejudices, our ingrained biases; notions of the literary text that we take for granted come to the foreground and call on us to make crucial choices. Translation makes us somehow responsible. Responsible to what?, one might ask.

Since many of the problems of translation "translate" over to the writing of fiction and poetry, we'll be exploring the generative aspects of translation and "mis-translation": how translating might open up new reserves of language for us to mine; how it might loosen our grip on our own "voice" and let in others; and conversely, how our own language might affect our encounter with a foreign voice. The reading for the course will include a few short essays on the theory of translation (Dryden, Schleiermacher, Schopenhauer, Benjamin, Ortega y Gasset, Steiner, Venutti), as well as some remarks on the process by practicing translators (Matthew Arnold, Ezra Pound, Vladimir Nabokov, Yves Bonefoy). We'll also be looking at some unusual creative uses of translation: Gabriel Pomerand's lettrist language games; David Cameron's "bad" translations of Baudelaire; erasure as translation in Jen Bervin's reworking of Shakespeare; and Czech poet Ivan Blatny's multi-lingual poems. Students will also become acquainted with several procedural strategies (homophonic, Oulipian, etc.), and perform some translation exercises along these lines, using languages they do know and those they do not. Assignments will be focussed on short texts or excerpts, no more than a page long.

Knowledge of a foreign language is not required.