Revising my syllabus, as the spring quarter approaches.  Here’s the reading list of critical articles that we’ll use.  Well, in fact, I really have to cut this down–we’ll never be able to use even half of this…, as I know from experience, but then this annual course comes around again and I collect pieces like this as if they were translation-candy:

Some of the essays are from Lawrence Venuti’s The Translation Studies Reader, others are from Rainer Schulte’s and John Biguenet’s Theories of Translation and The Craft of Translation, and we’re also reading some chapters in my recent book How Poems Think.

From Theories of Translation (listed here in the order in which they appear in the book): John Dryden, “On Translation”; Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Language and Words”; Friedrich Schleiermacher, “From ‘On the Different Methods of Translating’ ”; Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “Preface to The Early Italian Poets”; Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator”; Ezra Pound, “Guido’s Relations”; José Ortega y Gasset, “The Misery and Splendor of Translation”; Vladimir Nabokov, “Problems of Translation: Onegin in English”; Roman Jakobson, “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation”; Octavio Paz, “Translation: Literature and Letters”; Yves Bonnefoy, “Translating Poetry”; Michael Rifaterre, “Transposing Presuppositions on the Semiotics of Literary Translation.”

From Translation Studies Reader: Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Thick Translation”; Robert Eaglestone, “Levinas, Translation, and Ethics”; Steven Rendall, “A Note on Harry Zohn’s Translation” [of Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator”]; George Steiner, “The Hermeneutic Motion”; Hans J. Vermeer, “Skopos and Commission in Translational Action.”

From The Craft of Translation: John Felstiner, “ ‘Ziv, that light,’: Translation and Tradition in Paul Celan”; Margaret Sayers Peden, “Building a Translation, the Reconstruction Business: Poem 145 of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz”; Edward Seidensticker, “On Trying to Translate Japanese”; William Weaver, “The Process of Translation.”

And some extras:

Yves Bonnefoy, “Shakespeare and the French Poet”; Lera Boroditsky, “Lost in Translation” (2010); Lera Boroditsky, “How Language Shapes Thought” (2011); David Crystal, “How We Mean”; Dick Davis, “All My Soul is There: Verse Translation and the Rhetoric of English Poetry”; Haroldo de Campos, “Translation as Creation and Criticism”; Reginald Gibbons, “Notes on Literary Translation”; Reginald Gibbons, “Poetic Form and the Translator”; Jackson, Virginia, “Lyric” (Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics); Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism: “Translation Studies” (2005; includes bibliography; online); Jan Mukařovský, “Standard Language and Poetic Language”