Departments
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Week of 30 January 1998 |
Vol. I, No. 18 |
Feature
Article
The translation seminar's singular pluralism
by Eric McHenry
The translation seminar offered through the University Professors program is a unique amalgam -- part graduate-level workshop, part lecture series. Almost every Friday throughout the spring semester, the course, taught by Associate University Professor Rosanna Warren, hosts a different and distinguished speaker on the subject of literary translation. Last year, such authors and scholars as Gregory Rabassa, George Steiner, and Richard Wilbur visited the seminar. The roster for this semester includes a number of accomplished translator-poets, including Agha Shahid Ali, W. S. Di Piero, and Charles Martin, who will present his program "In Praise of Paraphrase: Getting Back at Horace" on Friday, January 30.
Martin's education in Jesuit- run Catholic schools in the Bronx engendered an early interest in Latin. His doctoral dissertation concerned the influence of Catullus on the modernist poet Ezra Pound. He has published an acclaimed translation of Catullus' poems and is currently working on Ovid's Metamorphoses. An accomplished poet in his own right, Martin is often identified with the New Formalists. Two of his original collections, Steal the Bacon and What the Darkness Proposes, have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.
Warren has scheduled a lineup in which virtually every speaker represents a different source language. Ali, for example, will speak about "A Dual Loyalty: Urdu and English." A noted translator of the Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, he is a native of Kashmir, India, and is currently associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
The final program's presenters will talk about the challenges of translating when English is the source language. University Professor and celebrated poet Geoffrey Hill will join René Gallet, professor at the University of Caen, in France, in treating the topic "Translating Gerard Manley Hopkins" on April 24.
"This seminar is essentially his," Hill says of Gallet. "I have not collaborated with him on the translations he will be presenting. I am there as an English expert on Hopkins, to speak to Gallet's accuracy, his penetration into the very difficult semantics of Hopkins' writing."
Gallet has also been for many years the French translator of Hill's poetry. The two will meet for the first time when Gallet comes to BU for the lecture.
The Theory and Practice of Literary Translation seminar's Friday lectures are free and open to the public. They are held at 745 Commonwealth Avenue, Room 525. For more information, call 353-4020.