Category: Teaching

AI and Literary Translation: A Global Consideration

I’m just back from the 48th annual ALTA conference, in Tucson, AZ. At the panel I participated in (thank you to co-panelists Lisa Bradford and Steve Bradbury!), Amy Stolls, formerly of the NEA, suggested that a short guide to the use of AI in literary translation might be helpful to, as she put it, “people… Continue reading AI and Literary Translation: A Global Consideration

A Bit of Rudy Panko

While teaching this semester’s graduate seminar on Nikolai Gogol/Mykola Hohol, I noticed how inadequate all the existing translations of the earlier works are. The author’s distinctive style barely peeks through what often feels like basically explanatory prose in all the English versions. I also came to the conclusion that Gogol’s very first book is his… Continue reading A Bit of Rudy Panko

Trusting Up to Thirty

Thirty is the number I have somewhat arbitrarily taken as my limit number for Introduction to Russian Culture for the coming semester: ten artifacts/episodes from “Old” Russian culture, ten artifacts/episodes from “imperial” Russian culture, and another ten from the (again rather arbitrarily designated) post-1917 to the present “period.” I say arbitrary, but there’s an organizational… Continue reading Trusting Up to Thirty

Chat GPT Translation Test No. 2

Since a reader questioned whether Chat GPT had perhaps filched my own translation of the Jergović text I tried out in my previous test, I am trying it with a text that hasn’t been translated into English yet to my knowledge (if anyone knows otherwise, please send word!). This time I just prompted it to… Continue reading Chat GPT Translation Test No. 2

Rytkheu Panel Next Week

I’ll be participating in a roundtable next week (March 22, 1:30pm EDT; 5:30pm GMT & 6:30pm CET) devoted to the work of Chukchi author Yuri Rytkheu. The virtual event, organized by the Russian and East European Institute as part of a series on indigenous and under-represented writers from Russian-speaking spaces, will be hosted by my… Continue reading Rytkheu Panel Next Week

Teaching Poetry Translation

Here’s an assignment I’ve adapted over the years. It takes a lot of “scaffolding,” meaning reading and discussion of different approaches, with examples. In the past, I didn’t do enough of that. This time, too, I feel like we could have done more, but the class is not just on poetry translation, it’s on translation… Continue reading Teaching Poetry Translation

Menard’s Severyanin

Variaciones Borges recently published the latest installment of the Pierre Menard translations that I’ve been slowly working on. (Sincere thanks to Daniel Balderston for asking whether I had any more of those Menard pieces in the works. I did and I do.) This one re-frames a poem by a self-styled genius, ego-futurist Igor Severyanin, whose… Continue reading Menard’s Severyanin

Life of Ivanna

The most ironic aspect of the 2021 documentary Life of Ivanna is Ivanna’s dream of having her own place, which actually pushes the film along its main trajectory. This claim requires a little context. Ivanna is a twenty-six-year-old Nenets mother of five living, at the beginning of the film, on the Taimyr Peninsula in the… Continue reading Life of Ivanna

Grand Inquisitors

Excerpting Dostoevsky’s “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” for my Introduction to Russian Culture (lower level general education class), I find two relatively recent translations available online in a reasonable format for class. One is the Pevear and Volokhonsky version, which provides the whole chapter, the other a slightly condensed version of David McDuff’s 1993 translation… Continue reading Grand Inquisitors