Semester:
Offered:
Stephanie Sandler (Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures)
First-Year Seminar 36G 4 credits (fall term) Enrollment: Limited to 12
Translation makes culture possible. Individual writers and thinkers draw sustenance and stimulation from works created outside their own cultures, and artists working in one format get ideas from those working in entirely different media. Translation between languages and between art forms will center our seminar’s work. Taking a broad view of translation as a mental activity, we will study poems, fiction, film, photography, film, and music. We will stretch our own imaginative capacities by transposing material across media and genres, creating homophonic translations, and translating between languages. We will work individually as well as collaboratively. We will read a small amount of translation theory, and some reflections by working translators. We will invite into our classroom practicing poets and translators, attend readings and lectures at Harvard, visit the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and Houghton Library.
The only requirement is some knowledge of a language besides English – and a readiness to play with languages, art forms, and texts. Readings likely from Walter Benjamin, Jorge Luis Borges, Anne Carson, Emily Dickinson, Forrest Gander, Susan Howe, Yi Lei, Vladimir Nabokov, Eugene Ostashevsky, Sappho, and Wang Wei; music by John Adams and David Grubbs. Films to include Despair, Drive My Car and The Golem.