Preparing for classes that started this past week at Northwestern (this university’s academic year is organized by quarters rather than semesters), I have been sorting out some preliminary thoughts about literary translation.  The course is both a seminar and a workshop in poetry translation.  Students will translate several short poems from different languages–each student making his or her own versions, but discussing the versions collaboratively.  We begin with a briefing on each poem by an informant–a scholar or a literary native speaker or even the author (in the past I brought the Russian poet Ilya Kutik into the classroom to tell us about a short poem of his own; this year I will have another author present for one of the poems).  Among the poems we work on, I always choose one that is from either an ancient or a non-European language (or both).  This year, because Chris Abani is teaching at Northwestern during the fall quarter, we are using a poem of his written in Igbo (one of the languages spoken in Nigeria).  We spend two weeks on each poem–one class for the briefing, and three more for discussing our versions.  Meanwhile the students read a number of essays in two books edited by Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet, Theories of Translation and The Craft of Translation, plus some other essays from one text or another, including pieces by Kwame Anthony Appiah, Yves Bonnefoy, Dick Davis, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, George Steiner, and others.  Students respond to these essays and to each other on the course Blackboard site, and at the end of the course students create individual portfolios that include a research paper on translation and  revised versions of the four poems.

Here’s the paragraph with which I begin my own brief essay on literary translation:

A common word in one language may signify or connote an idea or feeling that is differently conceived or felt or not so often encountered in another language—for example, the Brazilian Portuguese word “saudade” (a kind of nostalgic longing), or the frequent everyday metaphors of “illumination” or “light” in French, a semantic usage that seems to derive from the intellectual history of France in particular. There can be grammatical instances of this problem, too, such as the present perfect tense in English, which as a construction signifies something like “an action begun in the past and continued into the present moment” (“I have gone to that club many times,” “I have never eaten sushi”); this tense may be difficult to comprehend for someone whose native language does not make use of it (Spanish has the tense and the concept; Italian does not have the concept and it uses a similar conjugation—auxiliary verb plus past participle—to signify an action completed in the past (“I went there many times,” implying that “I do not go there any more,” or “I did not eat sushi” on a specific occasion). But are these the kinds of problems that literary translators spend most of their time on?

From this, I go on to the larger questions, the ones that really do engage the translator more deeply–about language, of course, but also about literature, culture, history.  I will post more from this little essay later.