Dennis Wuerthner's Lecture

 Professor Wuerthner's lecture was a great way to address the peculiarities and challenges that are present in academic translations. He mentioned that with the sort of text he chose (a medieval piece of poetic criticism) he was aware that the main audience of the text would be academics. This provided him with the opportunity to fully immerse himself in the translation process by getting to know on a very intimate level his source text since he traced and explained every allusion, contextual reference, and the way the poems were received by their source audience. He mentioned that this translation had truly been an affair of the heart since he devoted himself to it for ten years. Moreover, during a previous conversation with him, he explained that he wouldn't get any royalties for this book (even though it would be quite expensive to acquire) and that he truly considers Pa'han Chip as part of his family which comes to show how passionate he is about this project.

During his talk, he also explained his translation methods and how he had to sacrifice the rhyme but managed to maintain certain formal features of the poems (like the word order) in order to replicate to a certain extent its effect. He also demonstrated the great knowledge he has of the text and how translation brought him closer to it by highlighting its several layers of meanings and implications (like Pa'han Chip's criticism of the military). I particularly enjoyed the way he read the poems since it allowed the audience to really capture the tone of each poem and which ones had a sarcastic or funny intent. Overall, I saw Professor Wuerthrner's lecture as a love letter to his project and as a way of highlighting how academic translation allowed him to pursue an affair of the heart by fully immersing himself in a highly challenging text. I really liked his closing remark about his translation being a bridge to antiquity that allowed the modern audience to find unexpected connections between them and the society of Pa'han Chip's time since it emphasizes the great value that the recovery of these types of texts has. 

– Lia

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