Event

Open Borders: Translation and its Perils

Fri, Oct 15, 2021

9:30 AM–5:30 PM

This event will take place online via Zoom. Please register below.

Join us for “Open Borders: Translation and its Perils,” a 2-day virtual conference on Fri-Sat, October 15^th-16^th organized by Professors Alexandra Coller and Amin Erfani (Languages and Literatures, Lehman College, CUNY), featuring keynote speaker Christopher Winks (Queens College, CUNY).

“Open Borders: Translation and its Perils” aims to explore the theory and practices of translation across world languages, disciplines, and genres throughout the ages. In times of border walls and banishment based on ethnicity, religion, and origins, there is an increasing risk of subjecting world cultures, literature and knowledge to a single overarching lingua franca, or leveling the diversity of languages to idioms of a few dominant ones. Translation is in peril most when, instead of accounting for what resists transparency in the original language, it washes down the untranslatable to digestible bits, intended for a select readership of a few major languages. Too often we forget, for instance, that Aristotle’s major books were rediscovered by the western world through their Arabic translations, during the Middle Ages. Indeed, translation is in peril of eliminating the foreignness of the original work and assimilating its alterity, rather than presenting it, as it should, in the form of the other.

The focus of this conference is on translation within and across a variety of genres and disciplines, which will open borders toward the other aspects of intellectual history, cultures, and literature, throughout the ages. We are interested in exploring the craft of translation beyond a mere utilitarian tool, as form of performance in and of itself.

Sponsored by the School of Arts & Humanities at Lehman College, & the PhD programs in French, Italian, and Spanish, & Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. For questions or accommodation requests about this conference, please contact AMIN.ERFANI (at) lehman.cuny.edu.

CONFERENCE PROGRAM

(All indications of time in this program refer to US eastern standard time.)

Day #1: Friday October 15

Click Here for Zoom Registration Link.

Panel #1 (9:30a.m. -11a.m.): Early Modern Italian Translations Across the Genres

“The Uncanny Isabella: Translating Isabella Andreini’s Letters within and beyond Literary and Social Conventions”

Paola De Santo (University of Georgia) and Caterina Mongiat Farina (DePaul University)

“The Pleasures and Perils of Translation, Mistranslation, and Non-translation for the Stage and Beyond”

Eric Nicholson (New York University, Florence)

“Unpacking the Doctor’s Bag: Translating Michele Savonarola’s Mother’s Manual for the Women of Ferrara”

Martin Marafioti (Pace University)

Panel #2 (11a.m.-12:30p.m.): Translation & Erasure

“Politics of Translation: Mary Shelley’s Safie Between English and Arabic”

Reyam Rammahi (University of Oxford)

“Erasure as Translation: Tracing the Multilingual Void in SONNE FROM ORT”

Felix Rössler (University of Тоronto)

“Feigned Foreignness: Monolingual Fictions of Translation”

Anna Schewelew (University of California, Santa Barbara)

Lunch (12:30p.m.-1:45p.m.)

Panel #3 (2p.m.-4p.m.): Translation as Performance: Politics, Creativity, Ethics, & Mediation

“Translation as Performance and the Eventfulness of the Political”
Raquel Pacheco Aguilar (University of Graz)

“Identities Embodied: Artists as Performative Translators”
Audrey Canalès (Université de Montréal)

“Outspoken or Invisible? Situating the Translator Amid the Ethical Perils of Translation”
Marie-France Guénette (Université Laval)

“Mediating Agents in the Literary Circulation from Dutch into Afrikaans: the case of Daniel Hugo”

Marike van der Watt (Stellenbosch University, South Africa) & Paola Gentile (University of Trieste/Stellenbosch University)

Keynote Speaker (4pm): “Translation: The Impossible Necessity?”

Christopher Winks (Queens College, City University of New York)

Day#2: Saturday October 16

Click Here for Zoom Registration Link.

Panel #1 (9:30a.m.-11a.m.): Translation & Interdisciplinarity

“Musical Poetics as Border Crossings: Nancy Huston’s Plainsong (1993) and Danse Noire (2013)”

Christopher Mole (Université Côte d’Azur)

“German-Polish-Jewish-British Films: The Invisibility of Silent Film Translation”

Dror Abend-David (University of Florida, Gainesville)

“(Re)translating The Journal of Frida Kahlo from a Multimodal Approach”

María Luisa Rodríguez Muñoz (Universidad de Cordoba)

Panel #2 (11a.m.-12:30p.m.): Translation & Theory

“Nothing is Lost: How to Read Everything”

Kaylee Lockett (University of Iowa)

“To Communicate or to Establish: What Schleiermacher’s Split between Translation and Interpretation Tells Us about a Contemporary Impasse”

Douglas Kristopher Smith (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso)

“No Solidarity without Surrender: Gayatri Spivak’s ‘The Politics of Translation’ as a Postcolonialist Feminist Response to Benjamin, Derrida, and de Man”

Asa Chen Zhang (University of Michigan)