GERM 342
translation: theories and practices
of linguistic travel


Ever since the story of Babel, translation has been conceived as both a promise and a problem. For Hölderlin, the beauty of translation was how it estranged us from our own language and that of the original. For Benjamin, it allowed a glimpse of a lost universal Language. For Borges, translation was literature's double: its mirror and its truth. And for a certain seventeenth-century school of translators (les belles infidèles), every translation was an act of beautiful treachery. Whether we talk about what is lost, found, betrayed, or overheard in translation, every translation is transitory. Translation is a trial, an essai or Versuch, it depends on the coupling of faith and failure and a thinking about otherness. Most of all, translation is an engagement with the nature of how languages work. This course will investigate the experience of moving between languages as a means of understanding languages, both in theory and in practice. We will read some of the major twentieth-century philosophical reflections on the problem of translation, engage in comparative close readings of actual translations (from German into English), and finally, produce our own translations over the course of the semester. Understood as a literary workshop, this course will allow us to experience first hand the difficulties, but also the pleasures, of traveling in languages.



Return to courses