Translation, Creativity and Creative Writing

Dates

Tuesday, February 19, 2013 - 17:30 to 19:30

Tuesday, February 19, 2013 - 17:30 to 19:30

Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - 17:30 to 19:30

A series of seminars organized by the OU’s Contemporary Cultures of Writing Research Group in collaboration with the Institute of English Studies, UL.
January - March 2013

Here is downloadable flyer for the events [PDF, 15 KB]. 

In the context of a Research Group whose focus is on the cultures shaping contemporary modes of writing, this seminar series will look at the kinds of creativity involved in writing and translation with a view to highlighting the re-versioning and re-visioning at the heart of creative and literary endeavour. It will also seek to interrogate notions of translation both literal and metaphorical and to reflect on the challenges posed by multilingual writing and self-translation for both Creative Writing and Translation Studies.

The seminars are free and are on Tuesdays from 17.30 – 19.30 from the end of January to the middle of March 2013. All seminars will be at Senate House, University of London, Malet Street, London - Venue map for Senate House.

Session 1: Modes of Creativity: writing and translation

Josephine Balmer’s latest collection, The Word for Sorrow, based around Ovid’s Tristia, was published by Salt in 2009. Previous poetry collections and translations include Chasing Catullus: Poems, Translations & Transgressions (2004), Catullus: Poems of Love and Hate (2004), Classical Women Poets (1996) and Sappho: Poems & Fragments (1992), all of which were published by Bloodaxe. She has written widely on poetry and translation for publications such as the Observer, the Independent on Sunday, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Statesman, and the Times. A former Chair of the Translators’ Association (2002-2005), she was Reviews Editor of Modern Poetry in Translation from 2004-2009, as well as a judge for The Times Stephen Spender Prize for poetry translation (2005-8). She studied Classics and Ancient History at University College, London, and gained a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. Her study of classical translation and poetic versioning, Piecing Together the Fragments, will be published by OUP in 2013. See thepathsofsurvival.wordpress.com.

Jeremy Munday is Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Leeds, UK. He is the author of Introducing Translation Studies (Routledge, 3rd edition, 2012), Translation: An Advanced Resource Book (Routledge, 2004, with Basil Hatim), Style and Ideology in Translation (Routledge, 2008) and Evaluation in translation: Critical points of translator decision-making (Routledge, 2012). He is editor of Translation as Intervention (Continuum and IATIS, 2007), Translation and Ideology (Special issue of The Translator, vol. 13.2, 2007, co-edited with Sonia Cunico), the Routledge Companion to Translation Studies (Routledge, 2009) and Corpus-based Translation Studies (Continuum, co-edited with Alet Kruger and Kim Wallmach, Continuum, 2011). His main research interests are in translation theory, the processes of literary translation and Spanish and Latin American writing in translation. See Jeremy Mundy's webpage.

Seminar 2 – Translation and cultural reception – February 19, 2013

Room 349, 3rd floor Senate House

Lorna Hardwick is Professor emeritus of Classical Studies and Director of the Classical Receptions in Late Twentieth Century Drama and Poetry in English research project. Lorna’s publications in the field of classical reception include Translating Words, Translating Cultures (2000) and New Surveys in the Classics; Reception Studies (2003) as well as articles on classical historiography, drama and poetry. She has a particular interest in the impact of various kinds of translation and adaptation on modern perceptions of Greece and Rome and has contributed articles to a number of translation journals.  She is, with Professor Jim Porter (University of Michigan) the Series Editor for the series Oxford Studies in Classical Receptions: Classical Presences and is co-editor, with Dr Chris Stray (Swansea) of the Blackwell Companion to Classical Receptions (2008) and, with Carol Gillespie, of Classics in Post-colonial Worlds (2007). Lorna is the editor of the Oxford journal Classical Receptions Journal and was the founding editor of the on-line journal Practitioners’ Voices in Classical Reception Studies, which is hosted by the Open University.

Fiona Sampson is a prize-winning poet and editor. She has published more than twenty books of poetry, criticism and philosophy of language, and received the Newdigate Prize, a Cholmondeley Award and Writer’s Awards from the Arts Councils of England and of Wales, and been shortlisted twice for both the T.S. Eliot Prize and Forward prizes. Recent books include a new edition of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Faber, Poetry Book Society Book-club Choice) and Coleshill (Poetry Book Society Recommendation). Published in more than thirty languages, she has eleven books in translation, and has received the Zlaten Prsten (Macedonia) and the Charles Angoff Award (US), and been shortlisted for the Evelyn Encelot Prize for European Women poets. The US edition of her Selected Poems is forthcoming from Sheep Meadow She is a Fellow and Council Member of the Royal Society of Literature, a Visiting Research Fellow at IES and IMR in the School of Advanced Study, London University, and the Editor of Poem: International Literary Review.

Photo credit Mark Bassett

Seminar 3 – Multilingual writing and translation – March 12, 2013

Room 104, 1st floor Senate House

Rachael Gilmour is Senior Lecturer in English at Queen Mary, University of London, where she teaches postcolonial and black British literatures.  Her research focuses primarily on issues of language, translation and linguistic encounter in colonial and postcolonial contexts - from 18th- and 19th-century South Africa, to contemporary multilingual Britain.  Her publications include Grammars of Colonialism: Representing languages in colonial South Africa (2006), and she has recently co-edited, with Bill Schwarz, End of Empire and the English Novel Since 1945 (2011).  Her current research project, Bad Englishes, addresses the multilingual literary experimentalism of writers in Britain from the 1950s to the present day.

George Szirtes’s first book, The Slant Door (1979) was joint winner of the Faber Memorial Prize. In 2004 he won the T S Eliot Prize for Reel, and was shortlisted for the prize again in 2009 for The Burning of the Books. In between Bloodaxe published his New and Collected Poems (2008). His new book, Bad Machine, appears in January 2013 and is a PBS Choice. His translations from the Hungarian include volumes of selected poems by Ottó Orbán, Zsuzsa Rakovszky and Ágnes Nemes Nagy and fiction by Krúdy, Kosztolányi, Karinthy,  Márai and Krasznahorkai for which he has won various prizes including the European Poetry Translation Prize, the Déry Prize and the Gold Star of the Hungarian Republic. He has also edited a number of anthologies of Hungarian poetry and fiction. He has also edited a number of anthologies of Hungarian poetry and fiction in English translation. He has also edited a number of anthologies of Hungarian poetry and fiction in English translation.

For any queries regarding this seminar series, please contact the series convenor, Fiona Doloughan (fiona.doloughan@open.ac.uk), The Department of English, The Open University.