 Hello everyone, my name is Michelle Woods. I'm at the State University of New York New Polts and I teach in an English department, but I guess I consider myself a translation study scholar and I've published three books on translation, Translating Melancondra, Sensoring Translation, which is censorship theatre in the politics of translation, which is about Vatsov Havel and the translation of his plays and also last year Kafka translated how translators have shaped our reading. There's so many titles, who needs them. So I've published mainly on Czech and Czech literature and film and the subject of translation, so that's my background. Also I'm going to do a bit of a sales paper. Brian's book, which is amazing, which is called, but he's finishing for Monday, which is called Translation and the Making of Modern Literature, is going to be the first book in a new series, which Bloomsbury are going to be publishing. Myself and Brian will be editing and it's going to be basically series for literary and cultural translation studies. So if anyone's interested, I've got a handout. We're going to formally announce it in a couple of weeks, once we have our logo, which seems to be super important to the publishers. But if you're interested, I've got a handout and you know, come to up to me afterwards. We're looking, we're actively looking for book projects. So if you're interested in that, so yeah. Well, that's wonderful. I feel like everybody already has a reason to be here. Yeah, just for that information, and that's, yeah, it's really okay. I'm Abiyah Kosher. I am not a translation studies scholar. I think that's fair to say. I'm a writer. I do write a lot about translation, about living between languages. My book will be out on August 25th. It's called The Grammar of God, a journey into the words and worlds of the Bible. So definitely spent a lot of time thinking about translation. And I think as many people in this room know, I write a lot of essays and reviews on translation, Wilson Quarterly, Harvard Review, IOR Review, The Jerusalem Post, blah, blah, blah. Okay. And I teach at Columbia College of Chicago in the MFA program in nonfiction. And there I designed a graduate translation workshop specifically for nonfiction writers. So that's what I will talk about, how I use theory in that classroom. Okay. And now turn it over to Michelle. Thanks very much. I have a handout. I'm not going to read this paper. I've written it because it was helpful to me to kind of put down my thoughts. And I have some great quotes from my students kind of reactions to translation theory. So just bear with me, but I am going to talk about it. So I have a little handout. There's not enough for everyone because I thought only three people would come to the table. So if you could share. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I thought theory would just scare everyone. So if I can, just if you could share maybe that would be great. It's just one sheet. So basically I want to talk about a class I taught last year, which is the first time I got to teach translation theory. I've been a professor of English for, this is my seventh year. And obviously I've been teaching mainly English classes. And I was figuring out for that time how to bring in, I've taught kind of translation life. So for instance, I taught a survey course, Beowulf to Milton. And you know, I'd always talk about the translations. We've looked at what James Heaney wrote about Beowulf. We'd look at different versions of Marie de France. Chaucer, we'd read Boccaccio to see how he translated Boccaccio into the wife of sorry, Clarkstown and so on. But I never got the chance to teach translation theory because how do you do it to how do you teach it to English students? My students are English majors. And part of the problem with my college is that they come to theory itself, full stop, very late, usually in their senior year. Because we have a lot of people coming in from community colleges who are then entering a 74 year college. So we don't have a kind of basic first year, here's theory course. So A, I'm teaching monolingual students for the most part with bad language educations often. Translation theory without any basis of kind of any theoretical training. So I had to really think long and hard about how to do this. It was a 400 level course. So they are kind of, they're more experienced students. But it's a 35 person class that I run as a seminar. So we're talking to like a huge amount of people, which is the normal for 400 level classes. But crazy. So you can see what I was up with, right? Up against, I should say. So what I decided to do was to teach a literature class with theory. I wanted them reading literature so they had a connection. I didn't want to just go in and teach a class on translation theory because I don't know where that would have gone. And what I basically did was a fairly standard set of texts from Russian and Czech because I can read Russian and I've written on Czech literature and translation. So we read Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment, which they hadn't read before, right? These are students who they might have read notes from the underground, but that's it in terms of Russian literature. So this is really the first time they're coming to these texts. We did Chekhov, we did the Siegel, Akhmatova, we looked at her poems, Cycle Requiem. We looked at a couple of Kafka stories. That's how his one act played protest and then Kondra's Book of Lactare and Forgetting. So what I did was in my syllabus was to teach these, but in between, get them to read theoretical essays or essays on the translators that we might discuss, right? Did it work? I'm not so sure. It was very hard. By the end of the course, I was convinced it was a disaster, I have to say, because it felt odd moving from talk about Anna Karenina one day to suddenly talking about gender and the metaphorics of translation the next day. I did get great evaluations, which really surprised me because I didn't get that sense from the class. It's one of those things where you end and you go, what did I do? But they seem to get a lot out of it, I think. So what I did to start off the very first class and saw on the sheet that I handed out to you, we did the whole formalities, this is what you're going to do in this class, but I got them to do a group exercise, which is to look at the same passage in Anna Karenina in three different translations. The Moritz translation, the Garnett translation, the more recent Paveir and Volokonsky translation. I didn't set them up for it, I just had a look at these, what do you notice about them? I was kind of surprised, so surprised how they got into it as an exercise. But they were fairly astute, they realized that the kind of differences between them, I didn't put the bold, I didn't bold the repetitions in it. But I said, you know, have a look, see what you think. And it was interesting, some of them thought the mod translation is more elegant, more fluent, and they really responded to that, which is kind of how we expect kind of people who haven't thought about translation to maybe think, you know, oh, it sounds more English, it sounds the way it should do. But then some of them did say, well, look this, the repetition of this word, enchanting, and I forget what it is in Paveir and Volkonsky, fascinating, fascinating and enchantment in the Paveir and Volkonsky. And it was a great way of, you know, I said, why, why is it there? You know, why, you know, is this a good way to translate it, do you think? And some of them were like, no, we wanted to sound more English. And some of them were thinking, well, you know, it's interesting, you know, there's some reason for it. And of course, it's a very famous scene from Anna Karenina, where Kitty, who's in love, love, love with Fronsky, goes to a ball and her aunt, Anna has arrived, who's this beautiful woman. And she's so excited, Kitty's like, whoa, a ball, this guy, my great aunt. And she's looking at Anna thinking how enchanting she looks. But in that paragraph, she moves from looking at Anna beside Fronsky, go, whoa, she looks so enchanting, she looks so enchanting, seeing her interact with Fronsky and realizing by the end of the paragraph that Anna and Fronsky have made a connection. And what's beautiful about it is that Tolstoy is using this proto-modernist method of, you know, this kind of repetition, this kind of, you know, bad style, in a sense, to kind of see us see this enchantment happening by repeating the very word, right? So it's a great way when they went, oh, God, he meant to do that, right? There's a reason why translator might go, it's important to translate this repetition because there's a there's an aesthetic reason for it. There's a stylistic reason for it. But it's also a great way to introduce Anna Kremina for me to say, it's a 19th century novel, it's a great story. But it's also got this kind of proto-modernist element to it. Not only Anna's stream of consciousness when she's going to, well, she's not going to kill herself. She's going to the train station. But that's where she kills herself. Which is seen as this, always quoted as this, why this is, you know, pre-joyce, but look what's happening. There are other elements, we've got a dog, Alaska will get into its head at one point. And, you know, and various other stuff in there where you can really see it. And one element, one thing that's very hard to teach about Anna Kremina is the boring bits, right? Because of course they respond, they're like, oh, Anna, Romsky, it's great, the melodrama. But, you know, teaching them that actually it's the stylistics that are kind of the interesting thing. The kind of rhythm of the novel has to have not only the melodrama but also the second story of Levin, you know, to kind of ground the melodrama in some ways. And also things like Levin's famous mowing scene, which the students hate. They're like, well, I'm reading about mowing. And, you know, it's traditionally in traditional kind of literary studies has been read as country versus city, you know, the simple peasant life, Tolstoy's philosophy, etc. But in fact, when you look at the mowing scene and look at the syntax, it has a mowing rhythm. And so this idea of what Tolstoy's thinking about is stylistic as well. So it's a great way to kind of go, there's more to this than this fantastic story. And of course, they really enjoyed the story, but they opened their eyes by thinking about translation. It opened their eyes to reading, to reading really well, right? So, so that was that, that introduced into that. We, but in between, so we stopped to read a few chapters, and then we read a couple of things about Constance Garnett, although we were reading the Povere and Balconsky version. I wanted them to read about a female translator who's, you know, who had this fascinating life, but was translating at a time when women didn't have as much access or as much kind of respect as literary figures, right? One from Sherry Simon's book Gender and Translation and one, an older book, kind of old school kind of book by Carolyn Heilbrunn. And they're really interested. It really opened up this question of who the translator is. And so I just want to quote a blog, they had to blog through the course. So one student said, learning about Garnett took a little, took the little education she had as a child and moved up in the world to be self sufficient. And of course, about how she managed to make such a huge impact in the literary world was truly inspiring. Thinking back to Garnett, she was translating mostly male writers. And it does not seem that her being a female makes much of a difference to the translations at all. It's something we talked about then in class. Another student said, I never gave much thought to those who translated novels largely because I was ignorant of the fact that someone had to translate various works. That translators are a major part of the writing and publication process. Translation is an art form in itself and an under-appreciated one at that. So of course, when we discussed the readings about Constance Garnett and Translation and Gender, I became much more grateful for the art of translation. What a truth there is to the notion that women and translator are nearly one in the same. The idea that men are superior to women, that authors are superior to translators and so on. And it doesn't end there. The act of translation allowed women to involve themselves in literature, politics and public debate. Around they were often restricted from. In the same blog thread, another student wrote, I had an epiphany this week. Translators exist. As embarrassed and ashamed as I am to admit that the concept of a translator is not something I thought very deeply about. I've been reading translated novels by Haruki Murakami, translated from the Japanese by J. Rubenfield Gabriel for a couple of years. It never occurred to me that these men spent hours and hours slaving away at doing this incredible writer justice. And she goes on, she says, I remember thinking, why can't they translate it faster? Well, it's probably because they have lives outside of work. They want to write the best possible translation. And I would assume they don't want to go blind, like Constance Garnett almost did. The two articles we read with her say, really put translation into perspective for me. I'm not sure what I was expecting from a literature in translation class, but I know I wasn't expecting to have a rapid and life-altering realization of the obvious in the first couple of weeks. I appreciate translators much more now, and I look forward to reading the semester without taking translation for granted. So you could really see, you know, so that was brilliant. I was like, yay, I got them in their eyes, right, straight away. Some of their eyes, not all of them. There are a few in the class we didn't. But we did. So we went back to Anna Crennan, then we read Vanuhti's, you know, the obvious, the translators invisibility, the first chapter from it, and Rachel May, the translator in the text, which is the great book about Russian, you know, the history of Russian, the translation of Russian literature. I wanted them to think about what got translated when and why, right, the politics of translation, right, the kind of bigger picture. And I was really surprised at the robust, there was a really robust reaction to Vanuhti's work. So one of them said, I found one of the most surprising elements of this class to be that we not only read and discuss texts in translation, but that we analyzed the process of translation as a force and a way of wielding power. I truly identified with the ideas of translation as a colonizing force, especially when this idea was supported by Vanuhti with statistics, which suggested that the percentage of books published in the United States that were translated from another language was only about 3%. When considering this, I thought that this might point to a society, i.e. America, that is stagnant. Another translator wrote, another translator wrote, I found that discrepancy in the number of translations acquired from other languages into English compared to the number of translations other countries acquire of English literature shocking. It is frightening to realize the detrimental global effects translation publication has in the world, i.e. America. I know that economics plays a large role in the works publishers choose to publish even more so than the quality of the literature, but I never considered the social and political ideals that also play a role in what is published or translated and how the work is altered. And finally a sixth student said, every time we talk about translation theory the entire culture behind it, I always find myself so amazed at the politics of translation and the other small details we so easily overlook. From learning that only 3% of literature published each year is translated. It makes a lot of sense that the content we choose is anything that appeals to our own egos. I firmly believe that a lot of the racism prejudice that exists in our society comes from the fact that we severely misrepresent other cultures. We saw this in the example of the article that talked about how America did not or was publishing certain literature during the McCarthy era, right, certain Russian literature. So I've got another one I don't know how boring this is but another one. So we're reading these articles, made me think about how we perceive translators and translated literature. Before reading the two articles I was much more partial to the idea of a translator that remained to use Vanuti's term invisible. One that stayed faithful to the text and translated it fluently. The more I began to think about it however I realized that such expectations are absolutely unrealistic. I actually found it somewhat unsettling that this subject, the role of the translator and the impossibility of having a true translation is something that is not discussed more frequently. Having read Vanuti and May's articles now, my perspective on translators has been drastically enlightened. I feel it's important for the readers to be aware that they're reading translated work because it makes the entire reading experience quite different. As we discussed in class I think becoming more comfortable of translations can help us as readers become equally as comfortable with that which is foreign to us. A kind of maturation that can only serve to make us better readers. So someone else spoke of, you know, thinking of Vanuti talking about trade and balance. I find it extraordinarily tragic that a range of novels has come to be dictated by the hands of editors and publishers who are merely looking for the next bestseller according to American and British standards. So at least it got them that side. The only time that we looked at two different translations was when we got to Akhmatava, simply because of space. It's much easier to do with poetry. And we looked at D.M. Thomas's translation and Hersch-Schmeyer's translations. And they're really shocked at how different they were. And I also gave them, because it's fun, an essay by Brodsky, which is a review of another translation. I think it's Kounitz's translation. And Brodsky in particular, he says, this is terrible. She can never be translated. Beautiful never see a true Akhmatava. Which they found fascinating. Because in fact, what I found fascinating is that they disagreed with Brodsky. They said, look, we see what he's saying. We understand that. But one of them said, I don't think that I disagree with him that there's someone at fault for this, the translator. And that the translator may tend to add some of his own poetry to Akhmatavas. It seems impossible not to. And I wouldn't necessarily consider his different interpretation as someone's fault. And this is something we talked about in class, the different interpretations of how they approached Akhmatava. And of course, it's amazing. And teenagers, they meet Akhmatava, they're just blown away. It's just a brilliant thing to do. But I thought it was great that they got to the level of sophistication where they weren't just going, this is a better translation because I like it more. But they were thinking, oh, they've made these interesting choices. And what does that mean in terms of how I read this poem? We then looked at Vanya and we read Susan Bassanat, who's a good partial part of the chapter on the English in Vanya, how he's become this English playwright in some ways, and through translation. And I also gave them a few pages from one of my book censored translation, not because it was particularly brilliant, I have to say, but it gave us a kind of pressy of the recent research on translation and theater. And that really fascinated them, the whole idea that if a translator is translating for theater, the text is going to be changed again, and how it really struck them at that point how creative an act translation is. And they wrote about that too in their blogs. They were thinking about them as part of the theatrical creativity, if you like. Then they did something more practical with Havel. I had done archival research for Havel's plays in his translator's archive, Fear of Blackwell. And so what I did is I gave them, we read the play and we talked about it. And I was so, I was so happy that they weren't reading it as a kind of Cold War, the way it's being read. Most is this Cold War. It's a dissident talking to someone who's collaborated with the regime. But it's actually a play about language. Havel's work is really about language. And how someone you can self justify your actions through language, how language kind of, we use language to persuade ourselves out of things, but at the same time, language kind of uses us, how we become prisoners of language. And they really got that. They loved the play, maybe because it was short. I feel like sometimes short and good. But I also, so I gave them what I did first was give them Blackwell, it had been adapted for the National Theatre in 1980 in England. And the guy who adapted it radically cut the play. There's a very long speech monologue where the guy who's the collaborator figure, he persuades himself, essentially, to, you know, not to sign a petition and then to, but it's this whole long, the long speech is so central to it because we see him, you know, kind of justifying this position, moving back, going forward. And you really need it. It's aesthetically central to the play. But the guy who's gone, yeah, it's boring. How can you stage that? And just cut it out. So it became this really political play. It's about a dissident and a collaborator at the radio. And the translator of Blackwell, she wrote this, this plays called protest. And she wrote a protest saying, look, you've turned him into this mildly amusing bastard, she says, you know, you haven't, you haven't understood the play. And they really responded to reading about the translator's kind of issues. And because we talked about the play, they'd read it, they were like, yeah, she's right. This guy just didn't get this play. They're really amazed by that. And that was great. Then what I did the next class is gave them a set of reviews from a 1983 production in New York, at the Public Theatre in New York. And they're all good reviews. They've got kind of terrific reviews and really widely, widely reviewed, which of course now the papers don't exist. It's very sad. They're going to be their mental reviews. And I just put them into groups. I gave them four or five reviews each and asked them what they thought. And it's fascinating because the reviews read it completely politically. So they loved the idea that director had put on the proscenium, like covering the proscenium art, this thing with Cyrillic writing on it. And then there were tanks in the background and hammers and sickles. And they were like, what is she doing? What was the director thinking? And just the language of the reviews. So really got them thinking about how, even after a play is translated, how it's then mediated by another level of translation by the reviewers. And it was such a hands-on. So they'd taken the theory that they'd read and just gone, okay, we can see it in action here. We can see these prejudices and these kind of reductive readings happening before our eyes. So it's kind of good practical production. And then with Condra's book, I also use archival material, letters between Michael Henry Hine and who were thinking about it at this conference. And Condra, which I translated, parts for them. And I've got it, I think, maybe a little bit on the back of the sheet. And you know, they were so they're reading these letters, which is great for them. And I had a kind of photocopy of what the letters looked like so they could see it in check. So they had a sense of being in the archives without having to be in the archives. And they're really interested that Condra was talking about punctuation, which is one of my big loves, talking about translation. And, you know, and so I want to give them examples about why, why punctuation is important. And I took this, this, I think it's on the sheet, this paragraph from the novel, a couple of paragraphs from the letos section of the novel, which is about this untranslatable word, letos, that Condra says, untranslatable, and which Condra had rewritten himself in a newer edition of the novel, he'd taken out part of part of the paragraph. But when we looked at that paragraph in detail, you know, showing them about why the punctuation in that paragraph was really important, and the syntax, the way the syntax was written. And what, in fact, I think Condra thought was untranslatable about the syntax and punctuation, which is why he rewrote it, why he took it out. So that was a really good way to thinking about prose as being, you know, as dance, again, like the anachronism, as dance as poetry in some ways. So by the end of the semester, I had really mixed feelings about the course. They loved that literature, they really responded well in the classes we did in literature, less well on the theory. There was a core of about 10 students who were just like, whoa, blown away by the, by this idea of the theory and so on. But, you know, there's 25 other students in the class. So, you know, what happened with them? I think in terms of theory, one practical thing I would do, if I told it again, is if I gave them a theoretical article, I think I'd give them a kind of guided reading sheet with questions saying, okay, so on page 20, so, you know, Laurie Chamberlain says, you know, when we talk about translation, we use all this a feminized language, right? So whatever, you know, so what do you think of this, right? So it doesn't have to be give me a right answer, but just to get them to make sure they've read it. Because I felt it sent me with the Laurie Chamberlain article, which is quite high, you know, high theory, that only maybe 10 of them read it. I think the rest began the first paragraph and were like, not going to read this, right? And so I think there's a way, and I think it would have been better in terms. So in class we covered it and we talked about it. A student gave a presentation on it, a very good one. But then I kind of went through the basics, right? This is basically what she's saying. But I hate doing it that reductively and I think getting the students to do it themselves would have engendered much better discussions in class. So I think more guided, kind of front loading it a little bit. So that's the basic thing I guess I come away with. But I do think it did open their eyes about translation. Even the 20 who may not have logged about it or may not been openly vociferous about it. I think they were like, man, we're reading the stuff in translation. There are translators. Books aren't just published, but they get their chosen for a certain reason. Cultures are reflected in translate. So that kind of stuff, I think, was really great. And I think it gave them a somewhat ethical way in which to read translations, not with the guilt, because we often give English monolingual English let students guilt about it, right? Go and read another language, which I'd love to say to them, but it's not good. It's probably not going to happen. Although, you know, they may read Marquez and then go, I want to read Span. That's why I studied Russian literature. I read Tulsa. I was like, I'm going to learn Russian. I did Russian and English at college. That's my one reason for doing it. I think people do that, right? So you have to get them interested in the first place. And I think that's part of it. And I think, but I think I don't want them to be guilty all the time. I want them to think, oh, there's a translator. Who are they? I'll Google them. You know, there are two different translations. Maybe I'll read another translation down the line and so on. I think, and not to think of translations as automatically bad, right? Which tends to be sometimes their reaction. But most importantly, I think at least with some background and theory connected to these more practical exercises, I think thinking about translation was a great way to teach English students how to read well and how to read closely. It's a way of getting them to read, to connect the stylistics of the text, which they often don't want to, in high school, they hook up that theme and character and they're like, yay, I got that symbol. But they don't think about the language, right? The syntax and all that. And to think about how that, the great fun when you connect that the commas and semicolons to the huge issues, the political and cultural issues that are connected to it, why are texts shortened and so on in editing practices, say, in, especially in America and England. And so that they can play with these huge issues, these political issues, but also really, really read well and closely read the text. So that's my report from my class. I have to say, I don't know how interesting this was for you, but it was the first time I've ever sat down and really thought about a class I thought in that kind of detailed way. And it was brilliant. If I had the time, I do it all the time just to think about what would my what would know. Well, thank you so much. That was super fascinating and super detailed and really, really, I loved your student comments. Really, really wonderful to hear. So first of all, I just want to express my gratitude to you for mentioning some of the politics, your politics, the politics of translation, because I think that's our conference theme. I think it's important to talk about for those of us who are not translation studies scholars, I think just teaching a translation class, just getting it on the books, is a political act, just that right right off of that. And I see an alum of mine, a student in the back, and I asked my students in their evaluations to make some sort of comment, you know, they'd like to see the course again. And that helped me for the second time around, you know, because the first time was a war. So I think that's important. It's important to mention. And so I think just the fact that we're sitting here is in some ways political, because it's not a given in many in many departments, especially not in all creative writing departments. Okay, so I think that what I'm going to discuss is going to be very different from what you're going to talk about, just because you're primarily a scholar and I'm primarily a writer. So of course, I'm going to teach differently. And of course, I'm going to have a different point of view. So I teach it in MFA program for, again, for graduate students in nonfiction and everything I do, I'm always trying to think, how can I help students become better writers? Right? That's my number one thought all the time. Okay. So of course, I believe, and I think it's a political I believe that translation is a key part of a writing life. That's what I believe. And I do believe that if you only read American literature all day long, you won't be that interesting. Right? That's that's basic. And I recognize that it is entirely possible to get an MFA degree in creative writing and read only Americans. Okay, it's very, very possible. Okay. And I, I feel like it's my personal mission to make sure that doesn't happen to my own students. Right? I want to make sure my students think about Poland once. Okay. That's all I want. All right. So that's kind of what I'm what I'm thinking. So I teach this graduate course. It's supposed to be the form and theory of literary translation. And I start the course with the theory of translation and then the politics of translation. So what I thought I would do is talk a little bit about how I teach the theory. Okay, how I introduce the politics of translation and then just give you an overall overall the rest of the course. Right. And then we'll open it up to make some general comments. And if you don't believe me, you can ask a Micah who's sitting in the back who actually listened to it for a different a different perspective. All right. So I begin my class the way Rosanna Warren who was my teacher began in poetry when I when I did a poetry graduate degree at Boston University. And I believe very much, you know, in Jewish tradition there's a person who gives credit to someone brings how would I explain this redemption to the world. Okay. So it's so hard to translate on the spot. So I really believe you know, that's the ancient rabbinical view that not to give someone credit, you're going against the reduction of the world. So I want to give Rosanna credit because I she was the first person who taught me many years ago. All right. So I begin with John Dryden Valter Benjamin and Robert Lowell. Those are the three. Okay. And as a practical tip, what Michelle was talking about, I do a lot of reading out loud. Right. Because I believe it's important for a writer and for a translator. Okay. So for the Benjamin essay, for instance, I make sure we read the whole thing out loud. Okay. Just as an example, it's difficult. All right. If you go line by line, you can have a real discussion about it. Right. Robert Lowell's essay is about a couple pages, two pages long, no problem reading it out loud. And it's fabulous. Okay. And for Dryden, I always make sure to read the sections where he says he is the disease of translation, which is very famous. Okay. So the sections, what it is, is John Dryden's preface to his translation of Ovid, but parts of the parts of that essay are directly about translation. I always make sure to read those particular paragraphs out loud for a few reasons. Number one, I'm teaching writers. I want them to hear what Dryden's prose sounds like. Okay. It's important. I want them to hear how Dryden himself obsessed about translation. I want them to know that major writers translate. Okay. That's my goal. I want them to know. Right. I also want to begin the course in two important ways. I very much believe in reading primary text, going to the source. Of course, I know that they can open a theory anthology and there is one on the syllabus and they'll have people referring to Benjamin, referring to Dryden, blah, blah, blah. I don't want that. I want them to read Dryden, Benjamin, and first struggle with it, break their teeth. I don't care. But I want them to have that firsthand experience before reading anybody else writing about it. Right. And that's I feel very, very strongly about that. That's why I begin with Dryden. Okay. Dryden's essay, of course, was published in 1680. Right. And then Dryden, of course, is British. And I want to have three different countries at the beginning. Right. Three different, three, so three different linguistic traditions. All right. So first we talk about Dryden and invariably the students I've now taught this course twice. And I can tell you I've seen the same reaction twice, which is very interesting. In the beginning, everyone hates Dryden. No one understands him. Why? Because, you know, frankly, most people don't sit around reading prose from the 1680s, especially if they're family students. So it's hard. It's hard. But something happens along the line, and people get charmed by Dryden. Dryden, you know, he's an acquired taste. Okay. And, and then they get charmed. One of my students right now, her email signature comes from that Dryden essay. That made me so happy. So I realized that she got it. You know, I think what Dryden outlines like no one else is how you can become obsessed with translation. And I think that's not a bad way to begin a course. To show people that you can get really, really, really into it. And you know who did get into it? Dryden. I think that's not a bad, yeah. Not a bad way to start. As I'm sure everyone in this room knows, Dryden lays out three possibilities for translation. Okay. Paraphors, metaphors, imitation. But again, I want them to hear that from Dryden, not from anyone else. Okay. And what we do is we discuss that at length. I don't care how long it takes. I want students to feel comfortable with the three options that Dryden himself lays out. And also my other goal teaching translation. My goal is I want students to feel comfortable translating. That's what I want. Okay. I don't want them to be scared of it. I, I, I want them to, to do it. Okay. I don't want them to spend the whole semester reading about translation and not doing a thing. So what I love about Dryden is he, he offers three options that disagree with each other. Okay. That's great. Three totally different polls. Right. So first, there's a lot of Dryden. I don't care how long it takes. I want to feel that everyone in the room is comfortable before I move on. Okay. So that's what I do. And then we read Benjamin, generally the entire thing out loud. A lot of Benjamin in my opinion, again, I'm writer primarily, you know, I feel Benjamin is a marvelous essayist. I feel he's a writer. I feel he has been unappreciated in that way. Again, I can credit the person who introduced me to Benjamin is the art historian Michael Freed, who's my wonderful teacher as an undergraduate and believed that Benjamin's writing on art was brilliant writing. Right. And I think that's how I began with Benjamin later when I became interested in translation. I realized to my delight that Benjamin had also written on translation. But Benjamin is also someone who you need to spend time with to get. You can't run through. This year I had an interesting experience. I'm teaching a small class. I have seven students and I got the feeling that they didn't get Benjamin. So you know what? I spent a second, I spent two weeks on one Benjamin essay. I don't care. I think it's an important essay. All right. I want them to get it. I want them to understand. I want them to think about the idea of translation as a mowing. What does that mean? Okay. It's a beautiful idea with Benjamin's essay. And Benjamin's other ideas that, you know, only a poet can translate a poet. Remember that can scare a student. Right. Especially today in the creative art world again, and of course, I fiercely disagree with this attitude. You know, people are taught that they're non-fiction writers and therefore they can do poetry. Okay. Or they're fiction writers. And of course they're actually, you know, ignoring the fact that historically people do a lot of things, right. But they get labeled that, oh, I can't do, I have a student writing me this week. You know, of course I can't write poetry. And therefore I can't translate poetry. So there's this ingrained idea. All right. And Benjamin kind of lays that out. But it's good to think about. They think about what Benjamin is saying. Do I agree with him? Do I disagree with him? What is he talking about? Right. What does he actually say? And Benjamin also has this beautiful idea of who is the ideal, who can possibly translate certain texts. And, you know, as someone who's written on the Bible for a decade, believe me, I thought about this. Because sometimes people ask me, well, which translation do you recommend? And part of the problem with that is, you know, who do you really think is capable of translating the Bible? You know, it's not recommended. You know, for a reason. And a lot of us in this room have translated great writers. But think about it. You know, who is a great writer? At times I see great, really great, asked, you know, great passages in biblical translation. But honestly, I can't tell you that anyone is fabulous all the time, because it's a great text. So Benjamin brings that up. Who in the entire universe of readers, who's capable of doing this. But I also think that's a freeing idea for a student. You know, there are some things that are above us, which I think is a great idea. Right. But we try anyway, sort of what, you know, so I think that's the idea. And then the third person, so that's Benjamin, and again with Benjamin also, I find that students struggle at first and then get into it. Okay. And that's why I recommend reading out loud. Because you can stop, you can figure out what's bothering people, and you can discuss line by line if necessary. By the time you've made it through Dryden and Benjamin, Robert Lowell is a, it's easy. Okay. And Lowell, of course, is much closer to our contemporary life. Most students have heard of Robert Lowell and have read Lowell. You know, actually, I will say, I'll disappoint to say that in my most recent class actually no one had read Robert Lowell, which sort of also bothered me. But I think it's more likely that someone has read Robert Lowell than Benjamin. Okay. That's more likely right now. But and Lowell, as you all know, has spoke invitations. And by this point what's awesome is everyone in the class knows that Lowell is referring to Dryden. You know, so I like that. I like that I don't have to explain it. And they know right away. Okay. And they feel empowered. They understand where it's coming from. And we read the Lowell introduction to imitations out loud. And as you all know, Lowell makes some radical comments. He says that he's removed stanzas. He's added things. He's changed, you know, he's done all kinds of crazy things. But what's interesting is Robert Lowell tells you what he's doing, which is helpful. Okay, which is helpful. And all right, so that's that. And then after we've had that, I find that having those three approaches laid out in the beginning offers a structure to the class and immediately gives students the feeling or at least I hope they get that feeling. Can I ask my guess that's true, that there are at least three very different ways of doing translation. Right. I want them to feel that they can choose that there's not one I'm very worried about getting the impression that there's one way to translate. Right. I just want to show that there are a lot of possibilities and that it's personal. You have your own theory of translation. Okay. And then after we read the theory, we spend a week reading a book I consider a political book about translation. And also I wanted to teach a contemporary book on translation, because I feel that there are these old these are older texts. Right. So I teach either grossman's why translation matters. Right. I highly recommend that book. It's first of all, it's a very easy read, especially after you struggle through dragon and Benjamin, it's a breeze. Okay. What's what's nice about if Grossman in terms of theory is guess what she refers to all sorts of theoretical texts on translation. She offers her take on Dryden, on Benjamin, on low. And by this point, I'm comfortable with that because I know my students again have had the primary text experience. So they're able to to converse with Grossman. Do I agree with you with Grossman's take on on Benjamin? Do I not? Right. That's okay. The other thing that I think if Grossman brings the table is I think she articulates the passion for translation in a beautiful way. So she offers another take on what Dryden was doing. Dryden says this is the overcoming the disease of translation. And if Grossman offers a modern take on that. Right. Edith Grossman also, I feel, talks about, you know, a lot of these political issues that we often discuss it all, the invisibility of the translator, the role of the transordant society, blah, but I think above all, the reason I like Edith Grossman is she makes translation contemporary. Okay. She makes it sound like this is something people do now, as opposed to this is something Dryden did. Right. So that's why I like Grossman. Okay. And so that's how I begin the class. So right now, you begin the class a couple of weeks, no translation at all, just reading theory, just reading politics. Okay. And then I feel this is important. I feel very, very strongly that it would be absurd to have a class on translation without translating. Right. And I've seen those syllabi, which always amazes me. So just so that you have some idea of how I do stuff maybe be helpful to understand, I'll tell you how the rest of the class works. Okay. Then we spend several weeks every week translate doing a translation from a particular language. Often most of the people in the class do not read it. Right. So we begin with self those things, home finance. I know it. Then there's a capitalist poem. Then I do an excerpt from the Bible. All right. And what I do is I have a student prepare a trot. Okay. And I know trots are not something everyone at Ulta reads with. But again, I want to show them how people do it. We may not want to do that, but just one of some of the possibilities. Right. And then I work with the languages that the students come to me with. And it changes every time. All right. So this semester, for example, I'm fortunate to have a student who's doing check. Yeah. Yeah. Which I don't have no idea what's going on. I also have a student this term doing Polish. I have in previous terms, I had a student doing Sanskrit. I'm just mentioning languages. I don't read at all. I had a struggle. And I always say, you know, I show them how I do the trot in Hebrew. Okay. And I do that. And then I encourage them to in that. And they also realize that there are individual ways to do a trot. Right. So what we do is every week, everybody in the class, that one student comes in, presents the trot, I make sure they read out loud several times as many times as the people in the class like, again, I'm trying to train writers. I very much believe in reading out loud. Very, very, very much believe. And also, I don't know if my students know this, but I'm always testing out a theory from my teacher, Derek Walker. Okay. Derek said that a good poem you can understand, even if you don't understand the language. Right. I'm always trying to see when all those students come in reading something from Czech, I just sit back and I listen and I ask myself before I look at whatever the trot is, I ask myself, is Derek right? You know, it's like kind of fun to think of this. That's a fun, fun teacher activity while you're at it. So I asked for something short, a poem or a small piece of prose. And then, and here I'm getting back to the theory. So we do that, we workshop that every week. Again, I want students to have a window into, we all know this historically, many people have translated when they don't know the language or don't know the language not well. I want them to see what that feels like. I want them to see if they agree or disagree. I want them to see what they can bring to the tell us, what they can bring to the Bible. Okay. Because we know that happened. And how do you feel about that? Right. And again, if you do it yourself, your views are going to be different than if you're reading a theoretical essay about it. So that's what I want. And then at the same time, we spend seven weeks reading books of intranslation, literature intranslation. And again, because I'm teaching nonfiction writers, I look for books with interesting prefaces. That's what I'm looking for. Okay. And this is another form of theory if you're looking for theory. What I have found is that many translators in their prefaces, write about their own personal theory of translation. And that can make fascinating classroom discussion. So I'm going to list a few that I have found particularly useful. Jeff Brock, who is very familiar with people who are all to Jeff Brock's first book, the collected poems about Pavesin, has a very interesting discussion of how he does what he does. Right. I also I have not taught it, but I've read it. I can say that Jeff has an anthology of Italian poetry, I believe it's 20th century Italian poetry, also has some interesting discussion and might work. But I've never taught that book personally. Okay. I have taught the Pavesin. It's an interesting preface to teach. Okay, I can tell you, interesting. The other one that I think, again, I'm looking for approaches that aren't like each other at all. The opposite I think of Jeff Brock would be John Faustiner. John Faustiner, of course, is the selan translator. Just to be careful, Faustiner has two books on selan. One is the Selected Poetry and prose, and one is a biography. Okay. I find both valuable. But I think if you're trying to sort of discuss how translators do what they do, the preface to the Selected Poetry and prose is a better call. Right. And one of the things that Faustiner discusses, which I think this could be a theory about, is leaving some words of German in the text. Right. So that's interesting to hear his take. Of course, it goes back to what Benjamin was saying. You can't translate, right? It goes back to that problem. But you can see John Faustiner's view. And of course, for those who haven't read that preface, it has a marvelous section of where Faustiner is staying, selan's dead, okay, sadly. Selan, Faustiner is staying over in Selan's wife's house. And at 4am, he gets up to go through Selan's library. And when he picks up a particular book, she says, Selan's wife says, you can't touch that. Right. But just to give you, I think it's a marvelous image for students on the dedication of a translator. I mean, you stay over with the wife, the library, and it's a little excessive. But it goes back to writing, you know, at the disease of translation. A Faustiner can't control himself. He has no, no time. But it's interesting to see. All right. A third one that I, that I find especially helpful is Peter Constantine. Peter Constantine's babble, beautiful piece on translation. Also, if you want to supplement, I think Peter Constantine's interviews with Words Without Borders and what he does are also good to use. Okay. So those, and I can talk about others if you want to teach seven straight weeks of translation. I look for different language every week. Okay. Also, if you can, a good because Michelle was talking so beautifully about looking at different translations. And, you know, obviously I've done a lot of that with the Bible. But I will say that the Peter, if you're interested in Russian, Peter Constantine offers a great opportunity to do that if you have patience with Amazon, because there's the Lionel Trilling Babble. And that to compare and contrast that addition in Constantine is fascinating. If you need a particular piece, I recommend looking at the story of the king in both translations. Babble's famous story of the king. But also how Trilling writes about Babble and how Trilling writes about translation is very different from how Peter Constantine does. So that can be very interesting. Just as a caveat though, the Trilling book is out of print. You can get it if you have patience on Amazon, but it's not fast. So I would say two to three seriously, if you want it, order it two, two months ahead of time, and if you will eventually come through. Again, for writers, because I'm teaching writers this, I'm thinking about this, it so happens that the Lionel Trilling Babble was extremely important to American fiction writers. So if you find yourself, I don't know if this is a fact of the people in this room, if you find yourself teaching short story writers or fiction writers, and especially fiction writers who shall we say worship the fiction coming out of the United States in the 60s, 70s and 80s, that style, that style writer, then the Trilling is an important book to get because the influences you can definitely see the influence. But if you're not teaching fiction, it's not so necessary, but it's important. That's why the Trilling book, I think, is important for writers, and that's good to know about. Let's see. And then just to give you a sense of, so I think they get the theory in the beginning of the class, they get the theory from these individual writers. And then I always make sure to teach a book, a book in translation with no theory, no preface, no afterwards, just to see what that's like. And to feel, I think that's also important, to feel what the absence of theory feels like. If you want a recommendation, I can recommend Amichai's books of poems. Amichai is, of course, a major poet of Israel, unreal, unreal looking at some of these editions. There are allusions. I mean, if you read Hebrew, you know that he's referring to like 2,200 years of history, 2,200, you know, thousands of years of biblical and medieval texts, no notes, no explanation, no nothing. And yeah, I mean it's fine, but you really, you really miss a lot. And what I do sometimes is I'll pick one or two poems and I'll walk students through what they're missing, so that they can feel it. But it's interesting to read a book with nothing. So there are many examples. There are many examples of a book with absolutely no theoretical, nothing. And that I think I also recommend that just so you can discuss why it matters and if it matters. And then, just so you know, my graduate class always ends with a large final project. What they do is between if it's poetry, I think it's 10 to 15 pages of poetry. If it's prose, it's 20 to 30 pages. And then I also require a translator's essay. The translator's essay must include some comments on your theory of translation. Right. And the reason I do that for two reasons. First of all, I teach a nonfiction program so I have to make sure I have to do that. Okay, there has to be an essay component to anything I do. So there you go. But also politically, I think many people at Ulta have heard me talk about this over the years. You know, I really think it's better. I think translators should try and put their writer in context. Especially if you're working with a language that, you know, language or a culture that people are unfamiliar with. Just as somebody who reviews a lot of books and writes a lot about literature and translation, I can certainly say that a strong essays, a strong, I would say, theoretical or political statements have helped me understand a writer in a way I otherwise would not. So I appreciate that. And I think that if, if I think that if students learn that early, they begin thinking about literature as a global conversation. And that's really my goal. Like I want, I want students to think of, of literature as a world and not as a small classroom in Chicago. I want them to think of, you know, different eras, different centuries, different languages and different approaches are speaking to each other. And that's my, I guess my own favorite translation. So, yeah, so that's, okay. Yeah. That's it for me. So, yeah. I guess we know each other, you know, and I think we've looked at the translation is reading and translation is writing. Absolutely. And I think what's so important is this idea of translators as readers as the first and intense readers of text. That's why they're so valuable. Absolutely. It's not only just a theory, but actually a reading. Absolutely. Right. And approaching that as an interpretation of the text. And then do you agree with it? Do you not agree with whatever? But it starts conversation. I think so. And I would say after working very, very closely with the book editor, I think that, you know, there are very few people in the culture who read that closely. Yeah. I would say either a very devoted editor, very devoted translator, who's going to ask you about every comma? It's a beautiful thing. And whether or not, really, I feel that way. And I, you know, I don't worry about whether or not, I don't know about you, but I really don't worry about whether or not my students will become translators. Although, if I may share my nafas, okay, I'm so happy like Micah has published this translation several national journals here. I think I've now had at least five, maybe six or seven students who've presented at Alta. And it's wonderful to see them publishing in nationally, which is fabulous. But in all honesty, that was not my goal. My goal was to introduce students to translation, make them aware that translation exists, make them comfortable with it, and make them the kinds of readers and writers that translation makes a person. So that's what I wanted. That's all I wanted. Yeah. Oh, so should we open it up? Let's ask. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so people have questions for us. Oh, some questions. Yeah. So great to hear about both in your classes and in your books, you're really inspiring and how to bring your students to the classroom. I'm wondering if there are any essays that all on translation pedagogy that either of you find helpful like, for instance, Vanuity's idea of the remainder. Is there anything else that you could recommend in terms of both thinking about translation pedagogy, but also possibly in offering translation pedagogy course for graduate students for being able to prepare the literature. That's a great question. Oh, yeah, no, it is a great question. I pedagogy. Yeah, if you've got a course that I teach, of course, called the Theory and Practice of Literary Transition. You can talk about that. One thing we need to do, of course, is share a civil box. Yeah, that's a great idea. But I'm trying to think, I think, he is, he is. It's coming out next year. The course that four of us designed was rejected from that volume because it was far too like practical. Yeah, or self-promoting. Something will be out there as an anthology within a year or two, I'm sure. Yeah, I think it's coming out of things out there. But we probably have collected knowledge right now that can solve that problem. That's actually an interesting idea. We could maybe also, maybe we should do something like that. Yeah, also an anthology. It's a great idea. You might go to roughly instead of MLA. Well, yeah, I didn't. They go faster turn around. Sure. No, this was somebody else's. This was somebody else's project and he was proposed to the chapter there was a call. Yeah, in terms of literary pedagogy, I don't think so much. I think you'll find stuff with John Benjamin's on translation training in terms of interpreting and machine translation, that kind of stuff, localization. So that's always associated with teaching, but you're, I think there's an actual dearth of work on, you know, teaching translation in a comparative literature setting person. Well, I can't speak about comparative literature, but I can tell you that even though I have only taught this course twice, I have received requests from all over the world asking me about my syllabi and things like that. And, you know, in Tel Aviv this summer, I visited a class at Parimah because they, yeah, they were trying to set up something like that there. So I think that there's a, I think there's a hunger for it. Like if someone's tracking you down on Facebook and asking you, it means that they can't find anything in the library. I think there maybe there isn't anything to answer your question. I think it also speaks to the change, right, that, you know, they're, I mean, they're obviously dedicated translation programs, but I think increasingly with the world in English lit and kind of the expansion, not expansion of conflict, I think it's a mix of kind of mixing together with English. I think there are more people, we're talking about this, who are teaching translation courses kind of under the radar. And, you know, we're saying I think that would be great to have some kind of community where we could share ideas and share syllabi, I think it would be brilliant because you don't know where people are teaching it, you know. Absolutely, absolutely. I think the key aspect of that sharing will be to demonstrate to deans and yeah, yes, yes, shares. Apparently small political act in the course of career, you know, in the minor, which means that it has to be offered a year was in our context, the data to be an existential threat to the English part. Who tends to view the world of literature as kind of a map, a 19th century nation state map. But it will take, I think, kind of a collective experience and knowledge of people like this to point out to a dean, you know, like, here's 27 other people at other places who think that this is a great idea for these reasons, you know, we need to get with the program because of the change that's happening, you know, that they have and it's like such a conservative institution that you just hate the change, you know, so that, oh, I'm looking forward to this work. Yeah, I mean, it might feel easy to all tour on horns and talk about how very, how great translations as a course for students to change the way they read and engage with tests because we're all translators and we're all interested. But it's, you cited some of your student, Michelle, you said some of your students' evaluations as great material to then defend that course's existence and get it approved from another time. And it potentially could be a useful exercise to cite other people's student evaluations from other institutions and say, I want to model a course on this person's course, the syllabus, this is the syllabus, it's run for five years. These are student evaluations. It's changed the way they do language, changed the way they do literature and writing. And I think we need to do something similar at this institution. I mean, you were talking about your courses. I teach a Spanish to English, mostly literary translation, word shot. And kind of, they're very different from the courses that you were describing. But still, I saw that there's kind of progression that is very similar in all the courses. And there's awareness, comfort, engagement. And those are the steps. And then you, Avia, is your name? Avia. Those are the words you, I wrote those down halfway through your talk. And then the very, the last two sentences you said included those words. That's so funny. It's because that's really what happens to students. And it's crucial. I teach undergraduates who are Spanish majors. And it's crucial to their development of critical thinkers and writers and speakers and readers. I think that happens to everybody. We might steal your three words for the future also. Yeah, I don't know. It's crucial for everybody to take the translation course. That hasn't thought about translation. And can I just say, because just a quick before, sorry, just quickly, that I teach a lot of education, English education students. And so I've seen a lot about the Common Core and, man, talk about even less fiction and even more American and more insular. So by the time we're going to get these kids at university, kids, students at university, they'll have read barely anything beyond the course. We saw the successes from one another. You can defend courses in your own institution. Exactly. That's good. That's brilliant. How's it suggested if all of us do the summary that we develop a series of position paper for position statements like MLA has and sort of MCTE from the National Council of Teachers and English. Because, for example, we're just proposing a master's program or including a translation course. But we have to defend everything we propose through the accreditation agencies in our field. And I think in our field, that's also in a sense it's not a formal accreditation. But we have to cite stuff from MLA and AD and MCTE. And if we had position papers of all of them that we could, in my case anyway, tack on to a program proposal or a new course proposal, that carries a lot of weight at least with my institution. What is the two-string graph? Lewis. Lewis. OK. Yeah. Just give us a spin. And we should maybe do a panel sometime on Common Court because there's a lot of misunderstandings around it. It's not kind of as ugly as people think. Yeah. I actually had a question that perhaps both of you can address. I know that in your graduate workshops, the final project is around 30 or 40 pages. But I was wondering how were this an undergraduate workshop, an undergraduate workshop, how you might pair things down if you would pair them down at all? That's a great question. Is this for me or is this for Michelle? Both of you. I think you teach undergraduate, so maybe you want to start a career. Yeah, I teach undergrad and grad. And so, for instance, I taught Benjamin at graduate level. But I've been scared to teach him at undergraduate level. But not that idea of reading it out loud. That's terrific. I'm just like, I'm taking it out. And I'm going to use it. That is a great idea because I've been afraid because it's such a wonderful essay. And I agree, so beautifully written. Yes. So I think that's a great idea. But you worry sometimes. It depends on the students. It depends on the class. Sometimes you'll get a really super smart class. Sometimes you'll get a real mix that you tend to get. So it depends. So it's pretty hard. But I think there's ways of approaching. I found in my teaching undergraduates that sometimes giving them stuff, really tough stuff, works because it scares them. They're shocked. They don't know what to do. And that can generate some great discussions often if you can approach it, if you can open it up for them. Well, you know, I'll just respond to Michelle and then I'll take your response for a sec. You know, I first encountered Benin as an undergraduate. Right, me too. Yeah, yeah. And I think that I appreciated him then. You know, of course, not all undergraduate. You know, it's uneven with undergraduate. But in my experience, I have actually taught, like you may not notice, I have taught the exact same course to undergraduate and graduate students as an experiment. I did it. It's not with translation, but a very similar class. It was a prose by poets class. And we read, I mean, seriously, I taught undergraduates prose by Tfetaeva, Brotsky, Lorka, a whole set. I basically taught the graduate seminar to undergraduates. And the reason I did it, it says, you know, Columbia College is the largest and most diverse art school in the United States. And I was getting increasingly angry at the crappy education, the undergraduates I was seeing had had. You know, I had students who couldn't read. I'm serious, you know, and I just was getting angry and angry in particular about the Chicago Public Schools. And I thought, I'm gonna teach the best literature out there for a semester. And if it's a struggle, it's a struggle. And I decided in my head that I was gonna give everyone a very good grade, no matter what happened. They didn't have that. But I decided. I decided. I decided because I was like, you know, you grew up, that semester I actually had not one, but two homeless students in that class. And I was thinking, you may be living in your car. Okay? But you will read, I will show you Lorca. You know, I was like, I cannot stand this for one more second. I don't care if you drop out in two weeks, but I don't want you to read more garbage. It's just, it was disgusting to me. So I did try that. So to answer your question for the undergraduate class, what I did, because I knew the reading was so hard, was I did a 12 straight weeks of one page essays is what I did. So that's how I lowered the writing component. But you know what? I can tell you the evaluations for that class were fantastic. And I think the students, and many of them wrote that they had never, you never heard of these writers, never knew. And one of the most moving, I'll just share with you, because I was so moved by this. I had one student, you know, a graduate of the Chicago Public Schools, motivated student with a terrible education. Absolutely horrible education that upset me every time. I would just upset me so, so much. And you know, he wrote that he got so taken with Adams like a Yevsky. I mean, how awesome is that? That he realized that he had a classmate whose grandfather was Polish. He went, met with the grandfather. He wrote, I was just so moved. And the grandfather was so excited that he read it to him in Polish, okay? And I thought to myself, if he drops out next week, he still has had this fantastic experience and carry it with him for the rest of his life. So I guess I would say, you know, you're limited sometimes, you know, you're limited sometimes what you do, but you can teach a very difficult undergraduate class. My own preference is when I do that, I make the reading really, really challenging and then I lower the writing component. I don't lower my writing standards ever. I lower the writing in life. And I also believe actually that learning how to write a good one-page essay is great. I have no problem with that. But it's, I won't require a 15-page essay and Zagayevsky from someone who's, who in my opinion, their high school education is a seventh grade education. It's just not fair. Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot that comes to my mind. I'll try to, if you think first, I don't want to overstate the obvious, but it's interesting that Benjamin's of course, himself translated already. That's right. That's right. For example, you know, the famous art essay, I always found it odd that it was translated as in the age of technical reproduction. Yeah. You know what I'm talking about? It's your barcide reproducibility that speaks to the idea of an essay, the translator that's the fun translatability is itself. And so I wonder if you, if you go into that, what do you do, draw Benjamin and say, you're getting this already. I do. I do. I always mention that it's a translation. Always. I think that, you know, I try to mention that whenever I teach anything in translation. And I always say that if you read this language, you know, you may want to read it in English. No matter, no matter what. Actually, you know, in non-textual progress, people read a lot of Monterna, right? And it infuriates me that it's never mentioned that it's a translation. But again, I think that that gets to the point of this is theory and this is literature when your point is in part, for having it's reading it aloud, that it can be appreciated as it's writing. This is writing and this is writing. Right. I think that's interesting. Yeah, right. Well, the other thing is, I came to a performing arts conservatory from German studies, so I teach there. And I'm considering, that's really when I first became interested in translation, because now all of a sudden I'm teaching all this German stuff in English for the first time and I'm really seeing them as being such like different texts to me. But, so I'm thinking of putting together a course on translation just as a general elective. When you talk about translation and reading, translation is writing. Translation is performing, in other words, how you perform something. Yeah, it's a great idea. So I'd be curious, if I ask everyone, I'm gonna ask the two of you, of course, afterwards. But if anyone has recommendations for me about theory that specifically talks about, for example, I have singers who sing the German leader in German, but of course there's a translation that goes on to then interpret it back in the original German. It isn't their original German. It's not their original language. And then of course they have dramas to perform translated works and so on. And then filmmakers to screenwriters who have courses on adapting for the screening. So the idea of translation as interpretive, performative adaptation is something that, yeah, if anyone has recommendations for me about what this could happen. I would just speak to that so briefly and answer Mike's question too, because this is a very good person to answer. And it brings students from different language backgrounds. So there's always two of us in the class. So last time it was me in the class. It was Gane Cheshire, you might have heard, is suffering because you're reading it every day. It's homework, things like that. Somebody from Russia this coming spring, French, French, Spanish study, maybe we've got students from five or six, maybe five or six different languages, of course. But for evaluation, so we do a blog every week and depending on the essential to this class, which is, we spend a lot of time on that and also we go through something. But the final project is a translation with a translator's preface, which gets context to the work, but also annotations. We require, so we also read the book, I was a crazy thing on the phone. And they really did it and we can make them do an annotated translation of some kind of semester. So we ask for these two different translator's genres. One is an annotated private annotation that can take the place of footnotes or we give them a bunch of different models for those. But then also the framing essays. So one is sort of context and one is about the text. And that whole project is about 12 pages max. So in about a third or third depending on what genre they choose. So that works. And then for the performative thing, we do what we call the translation soiree and these students produce a playbill or a chapel and each student gets three sheets, you know fold it, you can have five unfolded sheets. The original and their translation, each has only how much fits on half the page and 12 points. And then a reduced version of their essays slash annotations in the page, right? So everything that they did to the floor that gets reduced in this playbill. And they all dress up and we have champagne and they do the readings of their translation kind of like the translation's readings here. That's my first alt then it's like, oh, we do that. It's like magic or something. And so they read a small section of their original work and then we just do it a little more than what is like two minutes. And then a little tiny version of their thing. And it's just so affirmed because they have this artifact that can take home. You know, it's beautiful, the little chapbooks and then by the way, they get completely into it as a formal reading and our creative writing colleagues are kind of like love, you know. We do this without our permission now. So anyway, that's kind of your shared model for that and the timeline on it. It's really successful. That's great. That's great. I just wanted to add to the question of Camus, we've done at the undergraduate level, I teach this course, again, these are all made, these are professional, being professional, trained in drama, dance, and they just get them in all academic and they get it back on to me as well. And I teach this course on European realism and I do, we read Lukash, we read Todorov, we read, I mean, but of course, I think the key is as you say, front-loading and excerpting as well. I think it's important that they see the original, that they don't have to read the higher original essay. So you excerpt and you front-load with questions and I think they interleave that as you said you do with the literature and I think it does, it is doable. Even if you're listening to, in my case, don't need to read anything. There was a good essay, just for you, I have a couple of suggestions of essays on music and translation, later after, yeah, yeah, if you want to. One thing I like to draw in undergraduates is laden with traps. Because if you have, I've never taught undergraduate course, but if you taught undergraduate course in translation, you had somebody produce a 30-page product, this really, really big project. There's a lot of material there and they can really own it and it's big. But with an undergraduate course, you can even get a mid-semester test or something. You just can't do that, you've got a lot of students. But I'll look for, especially, maybe a poem that has two very early editions and they're not exactly the same. And you give them maybe a title, if it's very easy to define, you give them the title and the author and the year it's from and they have to find it and they get different texts and they see they're two different versions. They've got the year and this is the political problem and this is the, they're not aware of how texts get taken up and published, but then they have to do this performative thing of deciding and coming up with a solution and they're getting immersed in the whole problem, textual history of it. I say, I give them this Vallejo poem that has this line that says, lintas, asias, amarillas de gris. And he's talking about this, about blood. It's kind of genealogy and the circulatory system. And the asias, amarillas de gris is in some other versions, ansias, amarillas de gris. And it's very different. Obviously in English, if it's yellow ages, then we've got maybe a racist problem like in English. It's a very strange thing. And if it's ansias, it's something else. And it's that N and nobody knows which one's, the manuscript's gone and there are early editions of the poem and both ones, nobody knows. And so a translator really has to decide. A, I mean, you're gonna produce an edition of, like in Spanish and you just kind of put a footnote and say, two very different readings, there's an N or there isn't an N. But the English translator's got to choose and that's a very formal thing for undergraduates. It's only one line. That's the problem at home, I don't know about the problems. But that's one big thing. And they say, that's the test, go nuts. Little things look down. That's really wonderful, thank you. More questions? Just a practical question. So to begin to organize some thinking about this, maybe for panels next year and for a civilist database and know the idea of a volume or position papers with the best entry to that, just be the sense of the list. The altilist that starts to get to do. This work faculty, that's a great idea. Oh, I mean, I have a show for my dean, my colleague in English, who I really like, but it's just, you know, second time. I have never used the altilist's personal brains. I have never used it. Yeah, so anyway, I'd be happy to demonstrate some of my home code that there's, people are being smart people are talking about this. At least to gesture towards starting to organize things. But would that be the way to do it is my question. I think it's a good start. I think to have some sense of who's teaching, where and something. Right, so everybody on the list? Yeah, yeah. You know what I'm thinking at a bare minimum would be great to have. And I think we can probably do this when you register for the conference, is maybe to ask, do you teach a translation course? Yeah. Where, what's it called? Is it undergraduate or graduate? Because I think it's fair to say not everyone at ALTA teaches a translation course, right? And if we just, even if we knew, I don't even know, but what's, I mean, I have a vague idea of how many graduate programs and translations are already in the United States and sometimes students ask me. But beyond that, you know, I don't know if anyone knows. So maybe ALTA can do that. When you register, do you teach a class? Where is it? What's it called? Is it undergraduate or graduate? Would you be willing to share a description? Booklist, syllabi, that would be, actually Erica Mina can ask Erica to add that to next year's, I think that would be very interesting. And then you could go to your dean and you could say there are 30, again, it might be shocking too. I have a feeling the number might be shockingly low. How many translation courses there actually are in this country? Right. What percentage are there? In fact, another worst example that would not necessarily come out of it. You'll see it, but it's not part of a translation program. It's not in that. Right. So, you know, my boss defended fiercely and I've got it and now the students love it so we're adding more and more sections. It's great, but that's just an elective intervention. Right. So, I'll go beyond that. Right. Okay, good. Because I think you're right, I don't think there's any data on them. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for your talk, you're very inspiring. I took a lot of notes and there's still a lot of your ideas. Yeah, steal away. I was wondering, when you have to translate, do you ever do a team translation and also do you talk about anything at all? This, for me, for you, it's a great question. So far, I have not had any students work on a team translation, I have not. I do talk about, so that's a good point. That's a good point. I think I'd probably try and mention that there were teams throughout history, you know, I talk about the pavir, you know, I talk about some of those, but now that I think about it, that's a good point. I don't think I have any teams on my, but let me take that back. I have a team, I teach on the Khanabloch, and what's the other lady? The two Khanabloch and Kronfeld, to Duan Mikhai. So I teach that. Actually, on Mikhai, the very interesting poet to teach, if you're interested in translation, because he's had so many different translators and you can compare, contrast, Ted Hughes translated on Mikhai, Derek Walcott translated on Mikhai, and then you can look at two, you know, the two, the Hebrew scholars, you know, Khanab Kronfeld teaches at Berkeley. So I do that, so that's a team translation, but you're right, I probably should discuss that a little more. I do discuss editing and I'll tell you how, and now I realize I didn't mention that in my description of the course, but it's important to forget about that. I have visitors, okay? I have distinguished translators I admire, come and visit. Jason Grunbaum, who's a big ultiperson, came to speak with my class. I also always invited an editor, I'm gonna try it for more, so Susan Harris came to class, and so she talks about it, so that's what I do. I have an editor come in and talk about it, and the invitation is open. If anyone's gonna be in Chicago over the next four weeks on a Monday, please let me know. My class is up, what to find. This year has been difficult with the timing of Avalto, but yeah, so what I do is I have editor visits. Okay, so I'm gonna answer this question. Yeah. Can I add something to that? Sure. The program of the University of Iowa, the international writing program, every fall they've got writers from all over the world who come in and they're available to go anywhere in the country during the months. I didn't know that. If you, I mean, you have to pay their transportation, put them up, but then it's a really cheap reading. Wow, yeah. I've used them several times at Texas Tech, where I pay for the flight, actually put them up in my house, but then also because they don't have work visas, you find different ways to pay them, so maybe, what is it, like one of those $100 credit cards that you can buy. You know, I can use that, but is there a fabulous, sorry? Does your dean do your account list though for kids' cards for the honor area? No, so sometimes I gather them from all over the place so they can do those things, but I use them in my translation workshops, even though we may not be reading their material, but we have someone come in who's been translated who will read work in the original and in translation, but then they're actually, you know, this writer from, let's say, Nigeria, you would never be able to pay to invite you. No one's here. But they're already here, so you're bringing them in from on it. It can be expensive, but it's not as expensive. That's such a marvelous idea. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I can say, you know, curse have, but what's in my city, graduate, those were the morals. I mean, they're handpicked by their governments to represent the country, so they're usually very talented. What's the greater time? They're from August, late August to early November. Yeah, early November, yeah. So it has to be in the fall, and usually you find out, what is it, I think maybe late July, who the writers are, who the writer will pay. But Christopher Merrill is the director of the frame, so tomorrow. That is such a fabulous, yeah, fabulous election, thank you. Anything else? Anyone? No, last call. Okay, well, thank you actually. Thank you. Thank you.