This course will explore recent scandals in literary translation. A translator attacks in print the author whose novel she has translated. Bilingual readers discover that a translator’s version of a novel includes thousands of words that don’t appear in the original. A translator decides to omit the final chapter of a novel without informing either the author or the publisher. A translator reorders the chapters of a novel in order to bring to the fore a political message the author had kept hidden in order to avoid censorship. What is the work of the translator? What is the relationship between the translation and the original? How do we read a translated work of literature? We will read poetry, short stories, and novels from the Arabic, Argentine, Chinese, German, Italian, Korean, and Taiwanese traditions. No knowledge of a foreign language is required for this course.
About Professor Serrano
Professor Serrano's current research projects in Arabic Literature include a compilation and translation of the seventh-century poet Jamil's diwan and a study of the relationship between poetry in Egyptian and Tunisian protest movements and Classical Arabic tropes of complaint. In East Asian Literatures he is conducting research on women and eighteenth-century poetry in China and Korea (which also involves a great deal of translation). Projected research projects include a study of the intersection of Chinese and Arab cultures with music, art and literature in Hapsburg Vienna; resituating contemporary poetry of the Maghreb in a Mediterranean (rather than a "postcolonial") context, which entails the work of poets from Spain, France, Italy, Egypt, Lebanon and eventually Greece, Turkey, Israel (and perhaps even Albania and Croatia). A study that somehow combines a teasing-out of literary relations between Argentina and France in the nineteenth century along with an exploration of regional music and dance of Argentina is also forming.