Sample Course Descriptions

Translation Workshop | Translation Touchstones | Critical Approaches to Translation

"Neither can anyone learn English, one can only learn a series of Englishes," writes Ezra Pound. This workshop, designed for students who have some prior experience with literary translation, asks translators to define the particular English appropriate to his or her translation project. As a means to gain leverage on difficult or ambitious translation projects, students are asked to propose a set of English texts to be used as touchstones to guide work on the translation. These texts are similar to some aspects of the original: they may have a similar plot device, a common use of dialect, a shared literary ancestry, or a parallel style of metaphor. In the workshop, we study these English-language authors to discover strategies to use in revising the translations. Always charting the difficult course between apprenticeship and imitation, we sharpen our translation skills by intensely reading and researching our target language.

Workshop discussions have three parts: presentation of the original author by the translator, discussion of the touchstone texts, and workshopping of the translation. The course asks for multiple drafts of one translation project.

Required readings vary by the translation projects under discussion that semester.