Exploring the contact between English and its others, many anglophone writers have sought to extend the limits of literary form and defamiliarize entrenched linguistic and expressive practices through translation. Recognizing the fraught relationship between languages and cultures, translation scholarship is energized by questions of (in)fidelity, authority, and form. While these questions are not new, recent approaches render the effort of translation even more explicit. From Wong May’s 2022 re-formatting of T’ang era poems to Ugly Duckling Presse’s experimental book formats, new methods for presenting translation challenge an author’s authority, an audience’s fluency, and the stability of a text as origin from which translators proceed—all while emphasizing the translator’s visible, creative role.

This symposium will synthesize these recent developments and consider the new generative modes of literary production that are evolving through methodologies such as adaptation, pseudo-translation, and multi-media translations. These methods highlight problems of translatability and untranslatability. How do we discuss works that explicitly deviate from their source and foreground translation as a practice? What are we talking about when we say “fidelity” or even “original”? How might we do justice to the fraught sense of authority in a translation? And what would it mean to move out of a familiar terminology of translation toward a broader definition? This symposium proposes to approach these questions by examining current methods while speculating possible future directions for translation. Alongside presentations on recent translation developments, this symposium will also serve as an opportunity to hear recent translation work from a diverse range of languages, particularly Asian and Western European languages.

All participants must review the GSA’s Safety Acknowledgement and Participant Disclaimer before attending.