Charles Bernstein

English 584 / COL 726 Fall 1996
Thursdays 12:30pm, 438 Clemens

KEY
TL-Talking Leaves
PR-Poetry Room/420 Capen
L-on reserve-Lockwood (3-day)
X-xerox handout

New Readings:
Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997 (in English, Japanese & Korean).
Douglas Robinson:  The Translator's Turn and Who Translates? (SUNY PRESS)
Translator Subjectivities Beyond Reason
Reuben Browe, On Translation
Eugene Nida, Toward a Science of Translation
Rosanna Warren, The Art of Translation
Susan Bassnet and André Bassnet, Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation1998: Multilingual Matters
Materialities of Communication, ed. by H U Gumbrecht and K L Pfeiffer
Bassnett, Susan and Trivedi, Harish (1999) Post-Colonial Translation, Theory and Practice, London , New York : Routledge
The Scandals of Translation : Towards an Ethics of Difference by Lawrence Venuti
Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation Edited by Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood (Princeton, 2005)
Steven Yao, Translation and the Language of Modernism: Gender, Politics, and Language New York : Palgrave Macmillan. 2002, xii, 291 pp.
towards a foreign likeness bent: translation duration : poetics (book 1), ed. Jerrold Shirmora
nypoesia
See also, bpNichol, Translating Translating Apollinaire.
Venuti on culture of translation (2012)

Here are two more complex translation experiments with Chinese: the 85s & Jonathan's Stalling's Yinglishi

1. (August 30) Introduction
handout: John Donne in standard English, Shakespeare in hipsterese

2. (September 5) The Translator's New Clothes
Walter Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator" (x)
Steve McCaffery & bp Nichol, "Translation" from the Ratoonal Geomacy
Richard Sieburth, from the introduction to his tr. of Hölderlin, Hymns and Fragments
Haroldo de Campos, "Hölderlin's Red Word" : pdf
Lori Charmberlain, "Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation" in Venuti collection (x)
Lawrence Venuti, The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation (TL, L on order)
Venuti, New York Times review of Antonio Tabucchi translation (x)
Maurice Blanchot, tr. Siebruth, "Translating" (x)
Recommended:
Venuti, ed., Rethinking Translation (TL, L on order)
George Steiner, After Babel: Aspect of Language and Translation (Oxford, 1974)
Joseph Grahm, ed., Difference in Translation (Cornell, 1985)

3. (September 12) The Limits of Culture/The Limits of Translation
Clifford Geertz, "Culture War" (x)
Ludwig Wittgenstein, "Remarks on Fraser's Golden Bough" (x)
Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science (TL, L)
James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (TL, L): esp. introduction (x) and "On Ethnographic Self-Fashioning"
Thomas Kuhn, from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (X)
Antoine Berman, from The Experience of the Foreign: pdf
Recommended:
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
Further Reading:
Eric Cheyfitz, The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from The Tempest to Tarzan
Tejaguini Niranjana, Siting Translation: History, Post-Sturcutralism, and the Colonial Context

4. (September 19) The Homophonic Sublime: Breaking the Translation Curtain
Louis Zukofsy, "A"-9 (x)
Zukofsky, "Notes for the fist half of "A"-9" (x)
Zukofsky, Catullus (PR, x)
Six Fillious by bp nichol, Steve McCaffery, Robert Fillious, George Brecht, Dick Higgins, Dieter Roth (PR)
Gertrude Stein, "Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded" (x)
David Melnick, Men in Aida (TL,PR)
Bernadette Mayer, "Catullus #42" from The Formal Field of Kissing
Lee Ann Brown, Miss Traduction (handout)
Javant Biarujia (x)
Jabberwocky by Apple, various by Microsoft (x)
Bernstein, "A Test of Poetry" (x)
plus: *slide presentation*
Recommended:
Ezra Pound's tr., Electra, Translations (both New Directions) and Pound's Calvalcanti, ed. David Anderson
Paul Blackburn, tr., Proensa: An Anthology of Troubadour Poetry

5. (September 26) Pierre Joris
"Untranslatability/Translatability : Community/Uncommunity"
Breathturn by Paul Celan, tr. Joris (TL)
The Unavowable Community by Maurice Blanchot, tr. Joris (TL, PR)
The Coming Community by Giorgio Agambin, tr. Michael Hardt (TL,L)

6. (October 3) Translation Colloquium
We will meet in 420 Capen Hall. The session will go beyond 3:10pm.
Lecture by John Felstiner: "The Art of Loss: Translating Neruda and Celan"
Poetry Reading and Talk by Armand Schwerner: "The Tablets / Dante"
Introductions/responses: Jerome Rothenberg, Dennis Tedlock, Ray Federman
Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (TL or L).
Schwerner, The Tablets (TL or PR)
Rothenberg, "Total Translation" (x)
McCaffery/nichol, "Some Notes on J. Rothenberg and Total Tr." (from Rational Geomancy)
recommended:
Felstiner, Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu

7. (October 10) Susan Schultz
"Local Vocals: Hawai'i's Pidgin Literature, Performance, and Postcoloniality"
Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre,
published by Bamboo Ridge Press.
*
Yunte Huang, "The Translator's Invisible Hand" (x)

8. (October 17) Serge Gavronsky
Talk: "Transpoetics: Theory and Models"
Gavronsky, "Zuk/Zeuk or Louis Zukofsky in Translation" (x)
Gavronsky, two translaton into French of Zukofsky's "A"-1
St. Jerome, "Lettre à Pammachius"
A Test of Translation: 4 versions of Ponge's Les Mres & 6 versions of "Democracy"
Gavronsky, "Long Live Polygenesis"
Recommended:
Towards a New Poetics: Contemporary Writing from France, ed. Gavronsky
Gavronsky, ed. Modern French Poetry
Gavronsly, tr., Ponge, The Sun Placed in the Abyss and Other Texts
Gavronsky, Franics Ponge and the Power of Language
Gavronsky, "The Translator: From Piety to Cannibalism" in SubStance 16 (1977)

9. (October 24) A Conversation with Leslie Scalapino
Scalapino: Objects in the Terryfying Tense / Longing from Taking Hold, The Weatherman Turns Himself In, and The Front Matter / Dead Souls (TL and PR)
"Time and Activity / Qall that I Hear is me and Silence" (x)

10. (October 31) Barrett Watten
"From BASIC English to Under Erasure: Is There a Metalanguage?"
Watten, Conduit
Watten, "New Meaning and Poetic Vocabulary" (x), from "Under Erasure" (x)

11. (November 7) Untranslatable Parts: A Poetics of Nonsense
David Melnick, Pcoet (TL, PR)
Jean-Jacques LeCercle, Philosophy through the Looking Glass (TL, L)
John Johnston, "Translation as Simulacrum" in Venuti collection (x)
Starobinski/Saussure (x)
Khlebnikov, "The Word as Such" &c (x)
recommended:
Julia Kristeva, Revolution of Poetic Language (TL,L)
Marnie Parsons, Touch Monkeys: Nonsense Strategies for Reading 20th Century Poetry (L, TL)
Lecercle: The Violence of Language, Philosophy of Nonsense
Susan Stewart, Nonsense
Brian McHale, "Making (non)sense of postmodernist poetry" (a discussion of poems by John Ashbery, J.H. Prynne, and Ch. Bernstein) published in Language, Text and Context, ed. Michael Toolan (London and New York: Routledge, 1992)
Complete writings of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll
The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, ed. Opie
Alison Rieke, The Senses of Nonsense [readings of Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky]

12. (November 14) Hank Lazer
"Poetry, Criticism, and Institutional Negotiations"
Lazer, Double Space and Issues and Institutions, vol. 1 of Opposing Poetries (TL).
Recommended: vol. 2 of Opposing Poetries

13. (November 21) Special projects/rescheduled discussions
Andrew Benjamin, "Translating Origins" (untranslated, in Venuti collection (x)
Giorgio Agamben, "The Idea of the Unique", tr. Sullivan & Whitsitt, in Idea of Prose (x)
Recommended
Andrew Benjamin, Translation and the Nature of Philosophy


14. (December 5: Last Class

New Readings:
Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997 (in English, Japanese & Korean).
Douglas Robinson:  The Translator's Turn and Who Translates? (SUNY PRESS)
Translator Subjectivities Beyond Reason
Reuben Browe, On Translation
Eugene Nida, Toward a Science of Translation
Rosanna Warren, The Art of Translation
Susan Bassnet and André Bassnet, Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation1998: Multilingual Matters
Materialities of Communication, ed. by H U Gumbrecht and K L Pfeiffer
Bassnett, Susan and Trivedi, Harish (1999) Post-Colonial Translation, Theory and Practice, London , New York : Routledge
The Scandals of Translation : Towards an Ethics of Difference by Lawrence Venuti
Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation Edited by Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood (Princeton, 2005)
Steven Yao, Translation and the Language of Modernism: Gender, Politics, and Language New York : Palgrave Macmillan. 2002, xii, 291 pp.
towards a foreign likeness bent: translation duration : poetics (book 1), ed. Jerrold Shirmora
nypoesia
See also, bpNichol, Translating Translating Apollinaire.
Venuti on culture of translation (2012)

Here are two more complex translation experiments with Chinese: the 85s & Jonathan's Stalling's Yinglishi

Translation Experiments:

• Homolinguistic translation: Take a poem (someone else's then your own) and translate it "English to English" by substituting word for word, phrase for phrase, line for line, or "free" translation as response to each phrase or sentence.
• Homophonic translation: Take a poem in a foreign language that you can pronounce but not necessarily understand and translate the sound of the poem into English (i.e. French "blanc" to blank or "toute" to toot). (Cf.: Louis and Celia Zukofsky's Catullus.) (Rewrite to suit?)
• Take one of your response papers, or a found/selected text, and translate it into a half-dozen different critical/methodological styles.
• Lexical translation: Take a poem in a foreign language that you can pronounce but not necessarily understand and translate it word for word with the help of a bilingual dictionary. (Rewrite to suit?)
• Acrostic Chance. Pick a book at random and use title as acrostic key phrase. For each letter of key phrase go to page number in book that corresponds (a=1, z=26) and copy as first line of poem from the first word that begins with that letter to end of line or sentence. Continue through all key letters,

  This poem was generated by entering Lewis Carroll's poem "Jabberwocky",

  from "Through The Looking Glass" into an Apple Newton. Nonsense words in the original were each written three times to get the most consistent match. Lewis Carrol's Jabberwocky as "recognized" by the Apple Newton, (c) 1993 Robert McNally. Permission is granted to reproducethis if the copyright remains intact.

  Jabberwocky

        'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
        Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
        All mimsy were the borogoves,
        And the mome raths outgrabe.
      
        `Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
        The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
        Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
        The frumious Bandersnatch!'
       
       
        He took his vorpal sword in hand:
        Long time the manxome foe he sought --
        So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
        And stood awhile in thought.
        
        And as in uffish thought he stood,
        The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
        Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
        And burbled as it came!
       
        One, two! One, two! And through and through
        The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
        He left it dead, and with its head
        He went galumphing back.
         
        `And has thou slain the Jabberwock?
        Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
        O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
        He chortled in his joy.
       
       `Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
        Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
        All mimsy were the borogoves,
        And the mome raths outgrabe.
           
   Tablespoons
   
        Teas Willis, and the sticky tours
        Did gym and Gibbs in the wake.
        All mimes were the borrowers,
        And the moderate Belgrade.
       
       "Beware the tablespoon my son,
        The jaws that bite, the Claus that catch.
        Beware the Subjects bird, and shred
        The serious Bandwidth!"
       
        He took his Verbal sword in hand:
        Long time the monitors fog he sought,
        So rested he by the Tumbled tree,
        And stood a while in thought.
       
        And as in selfish thought he stood,
        The tablespoon, with eyes of Flame,
        Came stifling through the trigger wood,
        And troubled as it came!
            
        One, two! One, two! And through and through,
        The Verbal blade went thicker shade.
        He left it dead, and with its head,
        He went gambling back.
       
        "And host Thai slash the tablespoon?
        Come to my arms my bearish boy.
        Oh various day! Cartoon! Cathay!"
        He charted in his joy.
          
        Teas Willis, and the sticky tours
        Did gym and Gibbs in the wake.
        All mimes were the borrowers,
        And the moderate Belgrade.
   
  nathan kageyama
   
  stay come 
   
     Spock em, dey stay come; auwe, spock da scayed
     Movaments, and da luau feet,
     Stay all twist an' kooked
     Walkin' all jag!
   
     Spock em, dey stay come, one, afta da udda
     Scayed, ha moe moe-haf not
     Wen even spook da snow all white lidat
     An soun' stay in da bareeze
     An haf stay turn da udda way;
   
     Was da "kooks-wit-wings,"
     Safe!
   
     Kahunas wit da flyin' kine Nikes!
     Dey get de silva dogs
     Smellin' da hauna eya!
   
     Ai sos! Ai sos!  
     Dey was da fas' mokes
   
     Dose da shaap-smellin';
     Dose was da obake of blood
   
     Cruisin' on da leash,
     Shmoke dose leash-buggas
   
   
     This is a translation of Pound's
     "The Return" into pidgin
     (Hawaiian Creole English)!