French and Italian |
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Newsletter of the Department of French and Italian |
Supported in part by dues-paying members of the I.U. Alumni Association |
Translators converge on Indiana
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F rom Nov. 7 to Nov. 10, the Bloomington campus was host to the 19th Annual Conference of the American Literary Translators Association. This year's event was organized by Professors Mona Houston and Samuel Rosenberg, who chose as the theme of the conference Translating from Old to New, from East to West, which, without neglecting translators from modern or western texts, allowed a focus on premodern and nonwestern works. The keynote lecture, "Wrestling with an Ancient Art: Getting My Hold on Tradition," was given by Everett Fox, whose translation of the five books of Moses has been so enthusiastically received. Willis Barnstone, familiar to many in the French and Italian department, spoke on "My Life in Translation."
The conference had 16 panels, whose topics ranged from early religious texts (Sanskrit) through early European literature to Near Eastern and Asian (from Korea, China, Japan, and the Indian subcontinent). Participating members of this department included Professor Mark Musa, who was on a panel on Renaissance Italian, and Professor Houston, whose talk was titled "Faith, Gadzooks, and Damn!"
Two other very popular features of the conference were workshops and bilingual readings. In the workshops (of which there were many, in 15 languages) an extract of a translator's work in progress was considered, indeed, worked over, by peers. Our department was represented by Professor Norris Lacy, PhD'67, and Houston in the workshop on pre-19th-century French and by Professor Rosemary Lloyd, who joined Carrol Coates in a workshop on translating Baudelaire. In the bilingual readings, translators read (or had read) an excerpt from the original and its translation. Professor Patrick Meadows presented an extract from Francophone Vietnamese poetry and Houston an extract from her translation of Moliere's comedie-ballet, The Painter Named Love (Le Sicilien), presented last May in Bloomington.
Accompanying the conference was an exhibit, prepared by the Houston-Rosenberg
team, "Translation from Old to New, From East to West: Treasures at the
Lilly Library," held in the Portrait Gallery of the Library. Visitors could
admire translations of the Koran and the Rubaiyat, Galland's Arabian
Nights, Chapman's translation of Homer, Dryden's Virgil,
and other works.
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Last updated: November 18, 1997
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1997, the Trustees of
Indiana University