Lyric Returns: Craft and Creative Translation

Catalog description

This course features the study of premodern texts (poetry, romance, novellas) and students' creative translations as an informed critical engagement with those texts. As a WIM course each week will feature two sessions: a critical engagement with the primary text, and a study of a modern translation; and the writing of a creative translation. The critical sessions will be devoted to students learning about the historical and cultural context of premodern texts, along with their conventions of poetic form, genre and rhetoric. Texts will be in English but students can consult them in the original language (and in some cases versions in manuscripts or as song). In this course we will study how premodern writers foreground their craft of writing and how they devise poetic and narrative strategies for their treatment of desire, memory, or an unattainable beloved object. We will also discuss how modern translators devise methods for returning to the past in new ways and how and why they find contemporary relevance in the premodern.