Why Creative Translation Matters
Description
A recent flurry of publications has put the spotlight on the role of creativity and experimentation in the practice of literary translation (Malmkjær, 2019; Lee, 2022; Robinson, 2022; Grass, 2023; Lukes (ed.), 2023; Robert-Foley, 2024). Granted, creativity and experimentation are not new ideas or processes when it comes to theorizing and practicing literary translation—indeed, they are arguably at the heart of what translation is and does. However, the clustering of these publications points to a sense of urgency in the field and a desire to explore the potential for experimental translation practices to challenge the norms and politics that underpin linguistic, literary, and cultural circulation. This seminar intends to explore where this sense of urgency comes from, what forms it takes, and in what directions it might be moving.
On an immediate level, there is at play a concern about the rapid development of AI tools and translation software that are becoming increasingly sophisticated not only when it comes to producing what is perceived to be "basic translation", as in, the transmission of information, but also when it comes to their capacity to translate more complex textual forms. Turning to creative and experimental practices of translation could thus be seen as a way of safeguarding the value of linguistic difference which the machine tends to smooth over in the name of monolingual accessibility. At the same time, creative experimentation with machine translation may open up avenues for exploring utilitarian assumptions about language and translation itself.
More broadly, concerns over the encroachment of AI and the concomitant fantasy of monolingualism are symptomatic of the fact that translations are inherently part of wider socio-economic, cultural, and political dynamics, and thereby subject to and expressive of real and perceived challenges to these forces. Experimental and creative approaches to translation may become more urgent in this context as a way of rethinking individual and collective modes of relation: by highlighting the materiality of our different modes of engagement with texts, languages, and each other, they give value to the messiness of linguistic and socio-cultural interactions that shape us.
This seminar aims to explore both the conceptual reasons that underlie a push towards creativity and experimentation (hence the "why" in the title) and the material qualities of a creative and experimental approach to translating and reading (hence the focus on "matter"). While we are looking to explore this urgency in relation to the current period, we are also interested in discussing why creative translation matters in different periods, to provide a point of comparison and historical grounding to our exploration. We welcome proposals that engage with any aspect of creative and experimental translation, in terms of both content and form.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Dr. Delphine Grass is Senior lecturer in French and Comparative Literature and Director of MA Translation Studies at Lancaster University.
Dr. Brigitte Rath is Associate Professor for Comparative Literature at the University of Innsbruck.
Speaker Bio
Tyler Grand-Pre is an Assistant Professor of Black Atlantic and Diasporic Literature in the English at SDSU. His research ranges across African diaspora studies, translation studies, ecocriticism, and architecture and urban planning. His current project engages the infrastructure of housing as an expressive medium through which writers, artists, and architects have spoken to socio-economic imbalance, structural racism, and neo-colonialism in the U.S. and Caribbean.
Speaker Bio
Matt Reeck translates from the French, Hindi, Urdu, and Korean. His most recent translations include Abdelkébir Khatibi's The Wound of the Name, Paul Guillibert's Anthropocene Communism, and Milan Kundera's 89 Words followed by Prague: A Disappearing City. What of the Earth Was Saved, his translation of the Hindi poet Leeladhar Jagoori, is a finalist for the 2025 Derek Walcott Prize. Recent poems have been published by Voice & Verse, Harp & Altar, and remue.net.
Speaker Bio
Terry Bradford teaches French, translation, and interpreting at the University of Leeds in the north of England. Wakefield Press (US) and Liverpool University Press (GB) have published his translations of works by Boris Vian, Léon-Paul Fargue, & Clémentine Mélois. He is a regular contributor – of short translations, commentaries, and creative pseudotranslations – to US literary journal Typo: The International Journal of Prototypes, edited by Norman Conquest.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Rita Bueno Maia is Assistant Professor at the Catholic University of Portugal and a member of the Research Centre for Communication and Culture. She holds a PhD in Translation History and participated in the research project Mapping Voltaire in Portugal (2019-2024, University of Coimbra). She has co-authored Indirect Translation Explained (Routdledge, 2022) and co-edited an issue of Revista de Estudos Literários on “Rewriting and Memory”. She translates for the theatre.
Speaker Bio
Simon Leser is a PhD candidate in the French Department at NYU and a fellow at NYU's Center for the Humanities. He is working on a dissertation on the musical transformations of reading in late 19th and early 20th century. He also translated two novels by Joseph Andras, Tomorrow They Won’t Dare to Murder Us (2021) and Faraway the Southern Sky (2024), which have earned him a PEN/Heim Translation Grant and a nomination for the Society of Authors’ TA First Translation Prize.
Speaker Bio
The speaker is a graduate student in Translation Studies in Zhejiang University, China. She accomplished her bachelor degree in Translation Studies in Beijing Foreign Studies University, China. She studied abroad in Westminster University in 2022-2023. She is now a visit student in the Faculty of Arts, KU Leuven. Her research interest is in literary translation, translation history and comparative literature.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Julia Pelosi-Thorpe is completing her PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania after earning degrees in Classics and Italian Studies. She works with English, Latin, Italian, Dialects, and HTML to adapt, translate, and remix texts. These experiments are informed by research into histories of the book/textual technologies, and her translations have appeared in the Chicago Review, A Public Space, Modern Poetry in Translation, Asymptote, and other literary magazines.
Speaker Bio
Audrey Coussy is Associate Professor of translation studies at McGill University (Canada). Her research focuses on children’s and YA literature, and on the theory and practice of literary translation. She has recently written on the translation of avant-garde picturebooks, of children’s and YA horror fiction, and on the representation of autism in YA literature. She also translates contemporary fiction and non-fiction.
Speaker Bio
Nichole Gleisner is managing editor of Yale French Studies and a lecturer in the French Department at Yale University. She is currently working on a transgressive translation/biography project about the poet Joë Bousquet.