Posted on January 7, 2010 by Scott Esposito

Martin Riker of the Dalkey Archive Press has a great writeup of a panel he hosted at this year’s MLA conference. As he writes, the MLA stirred “shock and awe” in the translation community this year because the “presidential focus of the 2009 MLA conference would be on translation.” Martin puts the meaning of this moment into context:

Although the vast majority of professional-grade translators make their living as university professors, such devotion has hardly been reciprocated by academia itself, which traditionally has failed to treat translation as serious professional work or literary translation as a serious intellectual-artistic discipline. Thus MLA President Catherine Porter’s choice of translation as her focus seemed an unprecedented concession in a battle that until now had seemed more like a lost cause.

For those interested in literary translation and its future in U.S. publishing, there’s tons to read here. This is just one quote from a very worthwhile article:

The last panelist was Lawrence Venuti who began by suggesting we throw everything that currently exists out (from the kinds of translation taught to the sites of teaching to the pedagogy) because what we really need is a sustainable translation culture. Currently, Venuti said, echoing Gentzler, the most sophisticated forms of translation are neglected within translation studies; he came out strongly against the workshop model for emphasizing practice over theory and imposing its own aesthetics upon students, and said that such programs run the risk of shaping translation education to the market, whereas translators should be taught to question the market. He agreed with the need for translation as an interdepartmental collaboration (he would have such a program housed in the English department, but he is against a free-standing program, since everyone in the humanities should have a stake in translation practice), although he was quick to point out that becoming a great translator takes decades of work, and an undergraduate program does not even begin to scratch the surface.

For more on Venuti be sure to check out this post on his recent translation of Catalan poet Ernest Farres’ collection Edward Hopper. Selections from this collection, along with reproductions of the paintings that inspired them, appeared in the Center’s 2008 anthology Strange Harbors.