Rosanna Warren

Memories of the Translation Seminar

By great good fortune—it almost seemed like a beautiful accident—I landed as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the University Professors Program at Boston University in 1982 when the program was directed by the visionary scholar Rodolfo Cardona. The program itself was populated by translators and theorists of translation who had transplanted to B.U. a thriving program in translation from the University of Texas at Austin. The classicist Donald Carne-Ross was a driving force, along with the Arabist Herbert Mason and the Portuguese poet Alberto de Lacerda, soon to be joined by the classicist and translator William Arrowsmith and Roger Shattuck, the translator and scholar of French literature. B.U. already had a small, gallant seminar devoted to translation, run by Von Underwood; Rudi—Rodolfo Cardona—asked me to turn it into a full-fledged course.

In those early years, the seminar was magnificently funded by a Mellon grant Rudi procured, so we were able to devise a course combining a three-hour intensive workshop and theoretical seminar on Mondays with a presentation by a visiting translator each Friday. Looking back, I realize that the course carried the work load of two courses, not to mention the extra labor of organizing twelve visits a semester. But we were on fire with our vision, and not counting hours. Long before a program in Comparative Literature existed at B.U., the Translation Seminar became a de facto hub for comparative literature: colleagues from Classics, Modern Foreign Languages, and English gathered on those electrical Fridays to think hard about language, style, aesthetics, cultural context… whatever seemed to help. And colleagues from all the literary departments pitched in to help guide the projects in translation undertaken by each student.

Each Friday gave new inspiration: the list of visiting translators is too long to rehearse here, but it included powerful literary figures: Esther Allen, Joseph Brodsky, Robert Fitzgerald, Edith Grossman, Seamus Heaney, Richard Howard, Donald Keene, Anne-Marie Schimmel, Mark Strand, Charles Tomlinson, Rosmarie Waldrop… The seminar brought together poets, translators, and literary scholars in the underlying conviction that scholarship and art nourish each other.

These excitements engendered still others. Robert Fitzgerald agreed to let us name a Translation Prize in his name; I raised the money, and the prize ceremony each spring became a lively literary event. Again, the prize depended on the generosity of colleagues who agreed to serve on the jury each year. Inspired by the course, the alumna Aviya Kushner donated funds for another translation prize, the Shmuel Traum Prize named for her Israeli grandfather, a survivor of the Holocaust who loved languages: that prize honors the languages he cared for: Hebrew, French, and, yes, German.

Looking back, it seems to me that the Translation Seminar worked (and still works) on the principles of fertility and generosity. We could say the same thing of the act of literary translation itself. In 1989, I published The Art of Translation: Voices from the Field, an anthology of some of the key presentations from the Friday lectures. But the strongest evidence of fertility comes in the form of the work our students have produced. Some of the seminar’s alumni have gone on to become noted translators themselves. A few examples: Don Share’s several volumes of prize-winning translations of the poems of Miguel Hernández and Dario Jaramilla Agudelo; Amanda Powell’s translation of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s The Answer/ Lespuesta; Aviya Kushner’s book on Biblical translation, The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible; Tom Yuill’s transformations of the poems of François Villon in his own poems in Medicine Show; Ani Gjika’s translations of the Albanian poet Luljeta Leshanaku, Negative Space.

Looking to the past, I am most aware of energies moving into the future. And is it not in the hope of that movement that we teach? And translate?

Two thoughts, by way of conclusion.

I don’t have a PhD: I’m a writer and translator, nourished by scholarship and sometimes practicing it. The Translation Seminar, over the years, gave me something like an ideal graduate and post-graduate education. I owe an immeasurable debt to Boston University for creating the imaginative environment that made such an education possible.

And the idea of surprise. One never knows, when one is translating, what one will find. I laughed out loud today when I remembered the following scene from the Translation Seminar. We were gathered around the long table in the seminar room, deep in discussion of Walter Benjamin, when suddenly the door flew open and a large, rambunctious golden retriever lolloped into the room. We were startled into speechlessness as the dog gallivanted around us, utterly charmed with himself and confident, I guess, of charming us. From where I stood, I could see a young man out in the hallway ineffectually beckoning to him. The golden dog trotted up to me, and then lifted his leg and let loose a powerful stream of golden urine on the young man sitting next to me, drenching his trousers and his book bag. The student exploded out of his seat with a great clatter and imprecations, the room erupted in exclamations, and I recovered my voice and thundered, to the personage hovering in the hallway, “Get that dog out of here!” This is not an allegory. But I can’t help thinking that the art of translation risks inviting unusual forces into one’s space. And maybe that’s why we translators keep at it.

Rosanna Warren