Amelia Glaser Readings

Dear Students,


I look forward to working with you all this semester in Translation Today!  We have a very full roster of speakers in the Friday series. You can see the full lineup here:


https://www.bu.edu/translation/translation-seminar/

As I mentioned in a previous email, our first class will be on Monday, January 22. We will not be meeting Friday of this week since there is no lecture.

Next week, on Friday Jan. 26th, Amelia Glaser will speak about her recent work translating Ukrainian poetry. Glaser is a scholar-translator, working on politics and aesthetics, and on transnational and diasporic writing. She also translates and writes about Russian and Yiddish.

For our first class on Monday, I'll take you through how the class works and then we will have a discussion about Glaser's work to prepare for her talk on Friday.  Please read the attached pieces before coming to our first class on Monday: 

1. "A War Vocabulary": by Ostap Slyvinsky: a series of short interviews with Ukranians talking about how war "changes the meaning of words"

2.  The Introduction and a selection of poems from Glaser's translation of A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails, a book of poems by Halyna Kruk. 

3.  An interview with Halnya Kruk where she talks about her experience of being translated into English.

You may also find helpful this LiteraryHub post by Glaser that has some remarks on the long history of Russia's repression of the Ukrainian language along with some of Glaser's translations of poems by another woman Ukranian poet, Kateryna Kalytko. 

Your classmate Dina Famin will be doing a presentation on Glaser's work on Monday. Thanks to Dina for volunteering to start us off!

It is hard to say 'Enjoy!" about readings on such a difficult subject. But I think you will find them not only very sad, but also very powerful meditations on...and examples of... the value and the power of poetic language and translation even..or especially, in the most difficult times.

I look forward to our discussion.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Yasmine Seale

 Armaan Arif 04/07/2024 Professor Vincent Yasmine Seale presented the work not as a mere book, but as a living tradition of storytelling. She highlighted that the number "1001" is not just literal but symbolic, inviting endless contributions to this story. Seale discussed the challenges and innovations of translating such a classic. She plans to employ long, flowing sentences that span the course of a night, mimicking the storytelling technique of Shahrazad, who uses tales to stave off her fate until dawn. This choice aims to capture the original's poetic flair and emotional depth. Moreover, Seale intends to incorporate various manuscripts in her translation to reflect the historical depth and varied interpretations of The Nights . This method contrasts with traditional translations that typically cite a single source, aiming to portray the text as an evolving entity rather than a fixed work. Yasmine Seale’s lecture was a great portrayal of her translating style and ...
Read more

Yasmine Seale's lecture

 As part of the MFA in literary translation, this semester we are taking a class titled: "A Thousand and One Nights: A Translator's Playground" where we have learned the rich and complicated history surrounding the translation of The Nights . In this context, to have had the opportunity to listen to Yasmine Seale, the newest translator of this work,  was absolutely wonderful. One of the things she mentioned which I really liked was that The Nights  resists being called "a book" as it's more a tradition of storytelling.  This is very fitting since, as we have learned in this class, The Nights  is a compendium of stories that grew throughout time until eventually reaching 1001. Seale mentioned that she might be interested in adding her own stories to this ever-growing tradition since the number 1001 is less of a concrete number and more of an invitation to infinity. I also found it very interesting how the lack of a clear original or an author has provided dif...
Read more

Report on Megan McDowell

  Megan McDowell’s “FAQs: Highly Subjective Answers to All Your Questions about Latin American Contemporary Translation” Lia Galván Megan McDowell – a translator from Latin American literature into English – gave a lecture on Friday, February 2nd, 2024 as part of Boston University’s Literary Translation Series. She was introduced by the series curator Professor Keith Vincent who mentioned her impressive resume. McDowell’s translations have been featured in magazines such as The New Yorker and have won several prizes such as t he National Book Award for Translated Literature, the English PEN award, and the Premio Valle-Inclán. In her lecture, “FAQs: Highly Subjective Answers to All Your Questions about Latin American Contemporary Translation” McDowell discussed the questions she has been asked the most during her translation journey and shared her ongoing reflections about the most appropriate way to answer them.  The first question that McDowell addressed was “How long does it...
Read more