Professor Litvin Reflects on Teaching the Translation Seminar
For the past two springs at Boston University, I was fortunate to teach the Seminar in Literary Translation, a landmark seminar founded and nurtured for three decades by Rosanna Warren. Formally called “The Practice and Theory of Literary Translation,” this project has a lot of moving parts. The base is a three-hour weekly course for undergrad seniors and MFA students. Practice comes before theory. We work through exercises, discuss readings, and workshop each student’s substantial final project. Students have worked with Spanish, French, Japanese, German, Chinese, Italian, Arabic, Russian, Biblical Hebrew, and Louisiana Cajun.
Meanwhile, every Friday, in a lecture series open to the public, we welcome a guest for two full hours of lecture and discussion. The series gives the instructor an astonishing chance to invite working literary translators, friends and lifelong heroes from the Boston area and beyond. Sometimes it gets heated, sometimes quite textually detailed. Inevitably, those Friday sessions filter into the course, illustrating or complicating the theoretical works we read. The audiences at each talk also flavor the course— friends of my students, local friends of the speaker, colleagues, specialists in the source language, literary journalists, Boston-area poets and writers, translators and teachers of translation from as far as Connecticut. Two talks drew recording technicians from the radio station WBUR. Guest speaker Ammiel Alcalay brought his mother to his talk.
Even in the schematic course description above, the word “friends” already occurs three times. No accident, because friendship is the ethico-emotional core of translation. I mean it strongly: sympathetic understanding, respect, shared humor, some indulgence of eccentricity, the Steinerian first hermeneutic step of élancement into the Other with the basic assumption that a valid interlocutor is present, that the Other makes sense. Between translator and author, between love and justice: friendship may be the best that we human beings, each blinkered in our own cultural-historical and emotional circumstances, can offer each other.
You can’t escape ethics. Whatever else translation theory pretends to be about—the feminist and postcolonial waves, the cultural turn, the Venuti-driven attempts to foreignize, the ethnography of translation and conflict, the effort to recover and valorize non-Western and non-modern theories of translation—boils down to ethics. What does one human being, one gender, one culture, or one time period owe to another? And incidentally, what do publishers owe to translators, and what do both owe to readers? Even self-proclaimed “posthumanist” thinking has not succeeded in eliminating the assumption that there is some cultural “Other” or personal “Thou” to whom a debt is owed—and I believe it is misguided to try.
Read the Litvin’s full piece, “Between Love and Justice: Teaching Literary Translation at Boston University,” here.