2022 Baldwin-Dahl Lecture: Karen Emmerich, Translating for Language Justice, in Comparative Literature and Beyond

Description: Translation has long been a bone of contention in the discipline of comparative literature: though it is in fact a key mode of practicing comparison, translation is nonetheless disparaged and diminished by some, and its products often frowned upon as failed, flawed, or at best unfortunate necessities. This talk proposes that we bring practices of both literary and scholarly translation to the center of our field, both to counter the mistaken but widespread impression that translation is a process by which some stable core of meaning is transferred from one language to the next, but also—and more importantly—to counter some of the structural inequities that characterize our current systems of cultural and knowledge production and dissemination. Emmerich will speak most particularly about the role collegial translation—the translation of scholarly work written by colleagues in other languages and places—can play in increasing language justice and access, and in facilitating exposure to and for other traditions of knowledge production.