Event Date: 9 March 2015, 18.30
The School of Languages, Linguistics and Film and the Department of Comparative Literature have pleasure in inviting you to the 2015 George Steiner Lecture. The lecture will be delivered by Haun Saussy, University Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago and Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Queen Mary University of London; it will take place in Arts Two Lecture Theatre on 9 March at 18.30 and will be followed by a reception. Attendance is free, but to help Events keep track of seats and catering, please book at the following address:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-importance-of-what-doesnt-translate-tickets-15402902496
Below you can find more information on the speaker and an abstract of the lecture.
Speaker's Bio:
Haun Saussy is University Professor at the University of Chicago, teaching in the departments of Comparative Literature and East Asian Languages & Civilizations as well as the Committee on Social Thought. He has previously taught at UCLA, Stanford and Yale, as well as taking visiting professorships in Hong Kong, Paris, Aarhus, Beijing and Otago. His first book, "The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic", dealt with questions basic to the translation and interpretation of literary works from times and places so far from the present that the possibility of real incommensurability of reference suggests itself. A second book, "Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China", admitted a broad zone of dissimilarity, sometimes antipathy, between cultural frameworks of reference but sought to turn disagreement into a new basis for reformulating those frameworks. His forthcoming "The Ethnography of Rhythm" scrutinizes the concept of oral poetic creation as a hybrid media event. Alongside these single-author volumes he has edited or coedited books on women writers in traditional China, on barriers and boundaries in Chinese culture, on the prestige of the Chinese written character in the imagination of Modernist poets, on the state of comparative literature in North America and on Dr. Paul Farmer's work providing adequate health care to the poor.
Lecture Abstract:
2015 George Steiner Lecture: "The Importance of What Doesn't Translate"
Translators, if they take pride in their work, are scrupulous about the differences between their languages. Notwithstanding a certain academic vogue for "foreignizing" translations, a translation into English is usually judged as a piece of writing in English. But English, with its composite texture of words imported from other languages, is perhaps the language least qualified to defend its borders. All languages borrow from other languages; moreover, they steal, inasmuch as the "borrowed" word is kept and turned into a piece of familiar property. Beyond words, it is conceptual families, narratives, cosmologies that may be imported and made as if at home, with the result that the very idea of a language begins to seem porous and vulnerable. With the so-called creole languages of the Americas as guiding model, and examples drawn from several continents and historical periods, we will make a case for importation, transcription, calque or dubbing, as opposed to translation, as the major agency of cultural and linguistic change.
|