Friday's lecture:
I really enjoyed getting to see Joanna's work-in-progress pieces on Friday! I forgot who is was from our class, but I also appreciate whoever asked her at the end what her planned next steps were -- I don't quite remember her response, but I remember that it was interesting so I might have to go back and look at the recording once it's uploaded. It was striking to see how much effort Joanna had put into trying to get to know Ginczanka, and Ginczanka as a translator herself, so she could almost read Ginczanka's poems through who Ginczanka was because evidently, I think, Joanna saw Ginczanka's poetry to be very intimately tied to who Ginczanka was as a person, and the life that she led. I also really enjoyed hearing her talk about the actual/political use that poetry for Ginczanka (the works she translated) and Ginczanka's own poetry got put to. I loved hearing her talk about this subversive ability of translation as in the case of the war-poem she talked about (I unfortunately cannot remember what the poem was even though I know it was by someone very well known) to slip under the radar of censorship authorities -- I think that anecdote speaks to something universally true about translation which is that because a translator has to believe that their text can in fact be translated, at some capacity (and so is not merely particular to the language it was written in), it always has the potential to be subversive to bigoted/xenophobic causes that want to see people who speak other languages in different cultures as fundamentally different. This, I think we've already talked about a lot, but I think Joanna's example concretizes this kind of abstract idea well.
I loved the Kafka quote, "I, who am not even the pawn of a pawn in the great chess game, fat from it, now want to take the place of the queen,, -- I, the pawn of a pawn, a piece which doesn't even exist, which isn't even in the game-- and next I may want to take the king's place as well or even the whole board" in the context of "Revenge of the Translator" but I'm not quite sure how I feel about the book itself -- I think the setup reference to Kafka gave me higher expectations. I wasn't expecting the second-person introduction, but I'm really really curious how the second-person might differ in the original French. Of the two, I think In Concrete was definitely my favorite. I also think I am an annotations supporter -- I really liked the footnotes here
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