Cult D: Living in Translation
Block 2
Tuesday & Thursday, 10:30-11:50 am (NY)
(5:30-6:50 pm, Kyiv/St. P)
The seminar will explore the difficulties and satisfactions of translation, what Walter Benjamin called “the foreignness of languages to each other.” Since so many of those in the program are writing, speaking, and thinking—living—in translation (and often in multiple languages), I thought it would be useful to explore the ways in which translators have theorized their work, how they negotiate the untranslatable (culturally specific idioms, technical languages with no counterparts across the linguistic globe, poetry), how they challenge the dominance of Western conceptual vocabularies (“gender” for example). We will read and discuss different approaches to this topic, drawing (I hope) on the students’ own experiences of the effects on them of living in and with translation.