Courses in Translation and Related Topics at Yale

Spring 2024

The Practice of Literary Translation (CPLT 925) Instructor: Peter Cole

Intensive readings in the history and theory of translation paired with practice in translating. Case studies from ancient languages (the Bible, Greek and Latin classics), medieval languages (classical Arabic literature), and modern languages (poetic texts).

Literary translation, Contemporary Workshop (FREN 192) Instructor: Nichole Gleisner

This course will focus on translating contemporary literature by exploring concerns of writers and translators working in the French and Francophone field today. Each week, students will translate an excerpt from a wide variety of texts written in French: prose, poetry, graphic novels, YA, science fiction, long-form journalism. We will also read and craft literary criticism, paying special attention to reviews of books in translation as we seek to understand and define the role of the translator in our current day. How does literary criticism complement the work of translation? In what ways is the current mode of approaching translations in reviews lacking? How can we develop criteria to evaluate works in translation that acknowledge the role of the translator? How do these activities – both translating and reviewing – enrich scholarly communities, webs of thought, networks of writers, students’ own ways of approaching and understanding a text? Students will translate and workshop selections each week as well as undertake the translation of a significant portion (25-35 pages) of a contemporary text of their own.

Course may be taken after FREN 150 or with permission of the instructor.

Reading and Translating Modern Japanese Literature (EALL 286) Instructor: L. Sanga

In this class, we read Natsume Sōseki’s canonical 1908 novel Sanshirō in its original Japanese. One of the most beloved works of modern Japanese literature, Sanshirō features an eponymous protagonist struggling to navigate college life, love, and friendship. I provide vocabulary lists as well as the historical background necessary to understanding the text, with a focus on its format as a newspaper serialization. Students are expected to come to class having carefully read the assigned chapter. We translate selected passages into English and discuss the text in the context of its initial publication venue and beyond. Students gain a deep understanding of this Japanese classic and become more aware of some recurrent challenges in translating Japanese into English.

Prerequisite: third year Japanese or equivalent.

Graduate students from any discipline who wish to take the class should email the instructor.

Natural Language Processing (CPSC 477) Instructor: A. Cohan

Linguistic, mathematical, and computational fundamentals of natural language processing (NLP). Topics include part of speech tagging, Hidden Markov models, syntax and parsing, lexical semantics, compositional semantics, machine translation, text classification, discourse, and dialogue processing. Additional topics such as sentiment analysis, text generation, and deep learning for NLP.

Prerequisites: CPSC 202 and CPSC 223, or permission of instructor.

Politics of East Asian Digital Media Culture (EAST 302) Instructor: T. Li

East Asian digital media culture, ranging from cinema, television, musical video, to online games, has (re)shaped the global and national/regional imaginings of East Asia. The Post-Cold War intensification of intra-Asian interactions has precipitated the rise of a Pan-Asian regional identity wherein the nation-state is not yet obsolete. What role does screen culture play in the border-crossing interplay among languages, ideologies, aesthetics, and affect? How do we understand the storytelling and politics of East Asian screen cultures in relation to its historical and social context? How does screen culture capture local/global desires in a digital time? Within the contemporary media ecologies, how does screen culture create an audiovisual relation that traverses screen and actuality? How do screen culture continue to push forward the history of transformation of sign system from the written words to visual moving images in the contemporary sensory over-loaded world of screens. This course deals with issues of (trans)nationalism, (un)translatability, locality and globality, (post)modernity, virtuality and actuality, and politics of gender. Students learn how to think and write about screen cultures of East Asia in particular and of contemporary screen culture in general.

The Senior Essay- Translation Track (FREN 492) Morgane Cadieu

A one-term research project completed under the direction of a ladder faculty member in the Department of French and resulting in a substantial translation (roughly 30 pages) from French to English, with a critical introduction of a length to be determined by the student in consultation with the advising ladder faculty member. Materials submitted for the translation track cannot be the same as the materials submitted for the translation courses. For additional information, consult the director of undergraduate studies.

The Golden Chain: Yiddish Culture between Tradition and Transgression (GMAN 230) Instructor: J. Price

This course offers an introduction to Yiddish culture across five centuries. How did the vernacular of Eastern European Jewry shape the making of the modern Jewish self? We consider this development through the metaphor of “the golden chain”—Yiddish as both a guarantor of continuity across diasporic time and space and as the medium through which the yoke of tradition could be loosened and broken. Topics and media include: translations/rewritings of the Bible, liturgy, rabbinic canon, and pan-European epic; Hasidic tales and the rise of modern Jewish fantasy; dramas, short stories, and novels set in the archetypical (Jewish) town known as the shtetl; popular theater and song; the daily newspaper; high modernist poetry; the golden era of cinema; wartime documentation and postwar memorialization; and the contemporary multimedia scene (Hasidic, left, kitsch).

How to Compare (LITR 140) Instructor: Hodgki

This course is an exploration of literary comparison from methodological as well as historical perspectives. We compare texts within genres, across genres and media, across periods, and between cultures and languages. We consider questions such as whether all comparisons must assume a common ground, and whether there is always an implicit politics to any comparison. Topics range from theories of translation and ekphrasis to exoticism and untranslatability. Readings include classics by critics such as Aristotle, Ibn Sina, and Kristeva, and writers such as Marie de France, Nezami, and Calvino. It also engages with the literature of our own moment: we will read a newly-translated novel by the Chilean writer Nona Fernàndez, and the Iranian poet Kayvan Tahmasebian will visit the class for a conversation. We will also discuss films (Parajanov and Barta) and a new Russian computer game.

This course fulfills an introductory requirement for students considering one of the majors in the Comparative Literature department, but all are welcome, and the methodologies and questions discussed in the class are useful for any kind of humanistic inquiry.

Interreligious Encounters (JDST 278) Instructor: M. Goldstein

The development and spread of Islam and the accompanying diffusion of the Arabic language brought religions in the Near East into contact in unprecedented ways. Judaism, Islam and Christianity were shaped and in turn shaped each other on the basis of the Arabic language, which was the shared medium of written scholarship as well as being the lingua franca of daily life. In this course we examine various aspects of this interreligious exchange, focusing on major topics in the dialogue between these three religions against the backdrop of a shared Islamicate culture, representing the pre-Islamic period through the early Ottoman period.

Class sessions focus on the close reading of primary sources in translation. Depending on enrollment and student interest, some primary sources may also be read in the original Hebrew, Arabic, and Judeo-Arabic. Students with backgrounds in Arabic are introduced to the Hebrew alphabet for this purpose.

The Book of Judges and Contemporary Religious Life (REL 507) Instructor: G. Mobley

This course explores a neglected biblical book filled with violence, antiheroes, and fractured folktales in order to wrest theological and ethical insights for contemporary communities of faith. Moving between a detailed examination of the translated text and the phenomenon of orality in ancient and modern expressions, the following topics, among others, are considered: the nature of stories and their enduring significance for persons and communities; the human body as a controlling metaphor in biblical meaning-making; gender, domestic, and martial violence; the emergence of literature from its original oral matrix; the function of that portion of scripture known as Judges in a centuries-long quest by ancient Israel to tell its story; and the corresponding millennial-long quest by Jews and Christians to interpret that story. Area I.

Jews Christians and Renaissance Bibles (REL 760) Instructors: Baden/ Gordon

This course examines Jewish and Christian sacred texts, and their production, interpretation, and cultural contexts, from antiquity to the seventeenth century, with particular emphasis on the two centuries following the introduction of moveable type in Europe. The course is taught in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and focuses on the study and examination of works from Yale’s rich collection of Judaica and Bibles. The course examines the complex history of Jewish biblical interpretation and its appropriation by Christian scholars in the medieval and early modern periods. Included are such topics as translation techniques, rabbinic commentaries, the history of printing, Christian humanism and Hebraism, reading practices, the use of Bibles in worship and study, and anti-Semitism. Area III.

Worlds of Homer (ARCG 741) Instructors: Bakker/ Lamont

Drawing together text, history, archaeology, and visual culture, this seminar examines the rich and varied worlds of Homer: the poems themselves, the epic tradition within which the poems were composed, the Bronze Age past and Iron Age present(s) recalled in the Iliad and Odyssey, and those born of the poet’s unique creative work. Questions of orality, interformularity, and performativity are considered, along with the immediate “reception” of Homer by lyric poets and within Greek festival culture (the so-called Peisistratid recension, e.g.) of the Archaic and Classical periods. What do new archaeological discoveries reveal about the Homeric world, and how can iconography (vase painting, reliefs) mend lacunae in the epic cycle? When and how did Homeric epic crystalize? Greek selections drawn from Iliad, Odyssey, Homeric Hymns, Plato, and more. Each week, this co-taught seminar has a Greek translation component and a historical/material component. Primary and secondary source readings.

Prerequisite: knowledge of ancient Greek

The Russian Nineteenth Century, Remediated and Reimagined (CPLT 662) Instructor: E. Bojanowska

This is a course about nineteenth-century Russian classics and their enduring potential to provoke and inspire. We study adaptations and transpositions as modes of critical insight into the original works they stage, interpret, and rewrite. How do texts by Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, Turgenev, Ostrovsky, Goncharov, Tolstoy, and Leskov, among others, speak to contemporary artists, audiences, and humanists? Focused close readings of the original works are coupled with the new transnational art they generated beyond their time and place in a variety of media (rewritings, transmedial transpositions, television and cinema, performance). Nearly all readings and films are available in the English translation; students with proficiency in Russian are encouraged to read Russian texts in the original.

Literature, Life, and Thought in West Africa from Mid-1800s to 1960s (AFST 485) Instructor: H/ Yitah

This seminar focuses on the genres of writing (journalism, expository and analytical prose, imaginative writing) that were used by the “Natives” in West Africa to generate a discourse of philosophical struggle against colonial domination. It examines the role of the institution of writing in shaping modern Africa, particularly how it transformed culture, beliefs, identity, established narratives, and conceptions of the new African nation. The currents of thought and debate, and the range of positions advanced by West African thinkers that shaped life and letters in British West Africa from the mid-1800s to the 1960s are dealt with. Attention is given to the the essay and the newspaper that were dominant during the colonial period, and the mainly imaginative literature—short stories, poetry, plays, and novels— in the era of the new African state.

Foreign in a Domestic Sense: Latinx Literature Aside the Law (AMST 039) Instructor: J. Miranda

How has Latinx identity emerged through and against the law? From the suspension of Puerto Rican sovereignty to the contemporary proliferation of ethnic studies bans, the state has used the law to delimit Latinx to transparent or static categories of irregular “citizen,” “refugee,” and “migrant.” If conventional thinking assumes that art only responds to the law in protest or affirmation of the status quo, this seminar introduces students to the ways Latinx literature engages, resists, and disidentifies with the law as it delineates national belonging. We ask how do Latinx creative expressions expand the notions of citizenship, nation, and family beyond their raced, classed, and gendered origins to imagine new futures. Through attention to contemporary tv, film, novels, and poetry, we examine how Latinx artists build alternative forms of thriving collective life in forms of mutual aid, queer kinship, party, and protest. Works up for discussion include those by Justin Torres, Raquel Salas Rivera, and the television show Vida. Drawing inspiration from these texts, students collaborate on podcasts, write analytical essays, and complete other critical and creative projects.

Enrollment limited to first-year students. Preregistration required; see under First-Year Seminar Program.

100 Years of Japanese Pop Literature (EALL 285) Instructor: L. Sanga

We cover a variety of genres, from historical fiction to light novels, and authors ranging from Edogawa Rampo to Murakami Haruki. We analyze these works against the literary and socio-historical context of Japan and consider questions of canon formation, literary taste and value(s), and the concept of genre. Occasionally we discuss highbrow or canonical texts and interrogate the validity of the highbrow/popular distinction.

All texts are available in English, no prior knowledge of Japanese or Japan is needed.

Reading and Translating Modern Japanese Literature (EALL 286) Instructor: L. Sanga

Prerequisite: third year Japanese or equivalent.

Graduate students from any discipline who wish to take the class should email the instructor.

Readings in Comparative World English (ENGL 128) Instructor: J. Cleary

An introduction to the literary traditions of the Anglophone world in a variety of poetic and narrative forms and historical contexts. Emphasis on developing skills of literary interpretation and critical writing; diverse linguistic, cultural and racial histories; and on the politics of empire and liberation struggles. Authors may include Daniel Defoe, Mary Prince, J. M. Synge, James Joyce, C. L. R. James, Claude McKay, Jean Rhys, Yvonne Vera, Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, J. M. Coetzee, Brian Friel, Amitav Ghosh, Salman Rushdie, Alice Munro, Derek Walcott, and Patrick White, among others. Preregistration required; see under English Department.

The Canon in the Colony: How Literature Made the British Empire (ENGL 290) Instructor: P. Mukhopadhyay

Exploration of the life of English literature in the colonial and postcolonial world, from the nineteenth century to the present. Close reading of literary texts, publishing statistics, school textbooks, film, and postcolonial theory. Topics include canon formation, education reform, colonial publishing, gender and education, global Shakespeare.

World Literature: Problems and Case Studies (ER&M 416) Instructor: H. Hever

The idea of “world literature” seems self-evident, despite numerous divergences and transformations since Goethe put the weight of his authority behind it in the middle the 19th Century. World literature, according to the standard view, is an international canon of “great books” that traveled between languages and survived as enduring cultural milestones. The frequently untransparent processes that lie behind such transformations are, however, also an enduring problem, as is the question of disciplinary competency for multiple languages, histories, conceptions and traditions. How can anyone speak for “world literature”? Where does literary history and interpretation intersect with anthropology? It is also easy to argue that the urge toward inclusive universalism is self-contradictory. The cosmopolitan concept of world literature is itself under suspicion of being Eurocentric, colonialist, touristic and ideological. World literature may also refer to the equally capacious concept of myth; to imaginative works of world-building; to works in which the concept of world is itself transformed; to works in which “the world” is at stake.

Literature and Philosophy, Revolution to Romanticism (HUMS 254) Instructor: Kramnick

This is a course on the interrelations between philosophical and literary writing beginning with the English Revolution and ending with the beginnings of Romanticism. We read major works in empiricism, political philosophy, and ethics alongside poetry and fiction in several genres. Topics include the mind/body problem, political ideology, subjectivity and gender, and aesthetic experience as they take philosophical and literary form during a long moment of historical change.

Epic Laments: Sorrow in Ancient and Contemporary Caribbean Literature (REL 903) Instructor: A. Hernandez-Acosta

This course focuses on expressions of sorrow in contemporary Caribbean literature alongside the ancient Mesopotamian and Mediterranean literature from which it critically draws in content, forms, or themes. With weekly pairings of ancient and contemporary Caribbean texts, the course studies expressions of sorrow therein in their aesthetic and historical specificity. The first and third units of the course pair portions of ancient Mesopotamian, Greek, and Roman epic poetry with contemporary Caribbean poetry and novels. Special attention is given to how expressions of sorrow are shaped by epic poetry’s features, such as heroic deeds, divine interventions, descents into the world of the dead, and prophetic visions. The second, middle unit of the course pairs biblical wisdom literature and Greek tragedy with Caribbean plays and memoirs to consider how expressions of sorrow are formed by the philosophical inquiries they dramatize. In short, this course asks how expressions of sorrow relate to broader themes that are as relevant today as always—empire, mortality, and political violence; gender and family relations; and remembrance of the dead and the divine. Area V.

Bodies, Senses, and Representations: Medieval and Black Studies in Conversation (AFAM 253) Instructors: Jung/ Jean-Francois

This team-taught, cross-disciplinary seminar uses diverse sensory and medial paradigms to explore the very different yet surprisingly congruent figurations of bodily and racialized difference and selfhood in the cultural productions of medieval Europe (ca. 800-1500) and modern America. Extending forms of analysis that interpret visual, spatial, musical, and performance arts through a strictly historical lens, this seminar listens for the resonances between Medieval European definitions of personhood through bodily movements, sensations, and signs and Black Studies’ grappling with the aesthetic implications of racialization—how Black peoples are sensed in and make sense of the world. Even as it takes specific works of art, music, performance, and literature as focal points to teach students about particular forms of cultural production, the course offers students the chance to reflect on field-specific processes and languages of interpretation, and to think about the entanglements both of diverse peoples within particular historical contexts and also of the past with the present.

Blackness in French (AFAM 506) Instructor: K. Glover

What are the historical linkages between Black France and the United States? Between Black Americans and Black French women and men? How is this relationship different from and contingent on the relationship between the French and their post-colonial “others”? How is “blackness” a category into which all non-white, racialized citizens are conscripted? Taking an internationalist (specifically transatlantic) approach and considering the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this course explores literature, art, culture, history, and politics emerging from or grappling with “blackness” in France. The texts and artifacts examined in this course consider “race” as both fact and fantasy in the uniquely complex, long-historical relationship among the United States, the French Republic, and the wider francophone world.

Black Existentialisms (AFAM 947) Instructor: S. Vogel

This course is an introduction to Black existential thought as it developed in the writing of African American and Afro-Caribbean authors. Existentialism was a historical movement in philosophy and culture typically associated with mid-twentieth-century European intellectuals that asked how individuals constitute themselves within and beyond the given constraints of and possibilities of their situation. But a deep tradition of Black existentialism—or what Lewis R. Gordon calls Africana philosophies of existence—is related to but distinct from the European tradition. Throughout the course we explore key existential concepts such as freedom, authenticity, responsibility, action, struggle, situation, anguish, dread, the gaze, and the Other as they have been imagined in Black diasporic expressive cultures. Some of the questions we ask include: How have Black writers developed existential ideas in novels, poetry, and drama? How does the encounter between European and Africana existentialisms animate the literature of Black freedom struggles in the US and across the colonial and postcolonial world? How does Black existentialism understand the (im)possibility of self-making within a society structured by dominance, and what might an existentialist understanding of Black collectivity look like? How can Black existential thought provide productive opportunities to reevaluate some of the seeming binaries that have shaped conversations in Black studies (in the mid-twentieth century and again today) such as hope/despair, being/nonbeing, humanism/antihumanism, and social life/social death? Why Black existentialism, and why now? Readings include work by Frantz Fanon, Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry, Ann Petry, William Melvin Kelley, George Lamming, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Ralph Ellison, Lewis R. Gordon, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, and others. This is an introductory level seminar, and no previous knowledge of the course content is required.

The Greek Diaspora in the United States (AMST 307) Instructor: M. Kaliambou

The seminar explores the history and culture of the Greek diasporic community in the United States from the end of the 19th century to the present. The Greek American experience is embedded in the larger discussion of ethnic histories that construct modern America. The seminar examines important facets of immigration history, such as community formation, institutions and associations, professional occupations, and civic engagement. It pays attention to the everyday lives of the Greek Americans as demonstrated in religious, educational, and family cultural practices. It concludes by exploring the artistic expressions of Greek immigrants as manifested in literature, music, and film production. The instructor provides a variety of primary sources (archival records, business catalogs, community albums, personal narratives, letters, audiovisual material, etc.). All primary and secondary sources are in English; however, students are encouraged to read available material in the original language.

Cognitive Science of Language (LING 116) Instructor: R. Frank

The study of language from the perspective of cognitive science. Exploration of mental structures that underlie the human ability to learn and process language, drawing on studies of normal and atypical language development and processing, brain imaging, neuropsychology, and computational modeling. Innate linguistic structure vs. determination by experience and culture; the relation between linguistic and nonlinguistic cognition in the domains of decision making, social cognition, and musical cognition; the degree to which language shapes perceptions of color, number, space, and gender.

Language and Geder (LING 146) Instructor: N. Weber

An introduction to linguistics through the lens of gender. Topics include: gender as constructed through language; language variation as conditioned by gender and sexuality within and between languages across the world; real and perceived differences between male and female speech; language and (non)binarity; gender and noun class systems in language; pronouns and identity; role of language in encoding, reflecting, or reinforcing social attitudes and behavior.

The Mystery of the Voynich Manuscript (LING 202) Instructor: C. Bowern

Introduction to basic concepts in language, linguistics, and cryptography through the study of the Voynich Manuscript (MS 408), a mysterious medieval manuscript held in the Beinecke Library. Review of major hypotheses about the manuscript, ranging from the fake, to code, to undeciphered language. Discussion of recent advances in decipherment and in the history of the manuscript.