Translation Seminar

The Translation Seminar deals with the practical side of translation: the translators' tasks (the problems they face and the solutions they find to demonstrate the originality and skill of the translator) and the market for translation (how issues of copyright and the law, demands of the market, affect the availability, quality, and style of translations).

For more information, contact conveners: Breon Mitchell mitchell@indiana.edu, Kevin Tsai sktsai@indiana.edu, or the Institute 812-855-1513.

Friday, November 20

James Falen (University of Tennessee) will read from his translations and speak “On Translating Pushkin: Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic Verse.”

James Falen is Professor Emeritus of Russian at the University of Tennessee. He served as a Russian translator in the US Army in the late fifties, then attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he received his Ph.D. in 1970. He is author of Isaak Babel: Russian Master of the Short Story (University of Tennessee Press, 1974). His translation of Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin appeared with Oxford University Press in 1995 and is widely regarded as particularly faithful to Pushkin’s spirit. He has also translated Boris Godunov and Other Dramatic Works (Oxford University Press, 2007) and Pushkin’s Selected Lyric Poetry (Northwestern University Press, 2009).

Thursday, December 3

Anthony Chambers (Arizona State University) will speak on “On Translating (and Re-translating?) Tanizaki, and Other Pressing Issues in Literary Translation.”

Anthony H. Chambers, a native of California, has spent more than a dozen years in Japan since first going to Tokyo as an undergraduate in 1964. His Ph. D. is from the University of Michigan, where he studied with the late Professors Edward Seidensticker and Robert H. Brower. Best known for his studies and translations of the 20th-century novelist Tanizaki Junichiro, Chambers has also translated authors ranging from Kamo no Chomei, of the early 13th century, to the contemporary novelist Hirano Keiichiro. His most recent publication, a study and translation of Ugetsu monogatari (Tales of Moonlight and Rain), received the Japan-US Friendship Commission Award for the best translation from classical Japanese, in 2007. He is Professor of Japanese at Arizona State University.

Friday, December 11

Richard Sieburth (New York University) will speak on “Fragments Shored Against Ruin: a Translator's Retrospect, Followed by Some Remarks on Making Music out of Maurice Scève.”

Richard Sieburth, Professor of French and Comparative Literature at New York University, has edited Ezra Pound's Poems and Translations, Pisan Cantos and A Walking Tour in Southern France. His translations include Hölderlin's Hymns and Fragments, Georg Büchner's Lenz, Walter Benjamin's Moscow Diary, Gershom Scholem's The Fullness of Time, Gérard de Nerval's The Salt Smugglers, Henri Michaux's Emergences / Resurgences, Antonin Artaud's The Cenci, and Michel Leiris's Nights as Day, Days as Night. His Selected Writings of Nerval won the 2000 PEN/Book-of-the-Month-Club Translation Prize. His Emblems of Desire (Selections from the Délie of Maurice Scève) was short-listed for the PEN Poetry Translation Prize and the Weidenfeld Prize.