Retranslation: Challenges and Opportunities

What textual and publishing challenges does the retranslator face? How are struggles and competition within certain fields of scholarship involved in retranslations? What can the inconstant permutations of retranslations teach us about translation’s constant state of betweenness? And can we consider retranslation a teleological act? This panel will approach these and other questions via specific cases of retranslations into English from various languages, including biblical Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, Portuguese, and Arberisht, a non-Greek indigenous language of Greece.

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Moderator

Kareem James Abu-Zeid, PhD, translates authors from across the Arab world. His work has earned him an NEA translation grant (2018) and PEN Center USA’s Translation Award (2017), among other honors. His most recent translation is Adonis’ Songs of Mihyar the Damascene. The online hub for his work is www.kareemjamesabuzeid.com.

Presenters

Peter Constantine’s recent translations include works by Augustine, Rousseau, Machiavelli, Gogol, and Tolstoy. A Guggenheim Fellow, he was awarded the PEN Translation Prize, and ALTA’s NTA for The Undiscovered Chekhov. He is Director of the Program in Literary Translation at the University of Connecticut and publisher of World Poetry Books.

Tal Goldfajn teaches in the Spanish and Portuguese Program at UMass Amherst. She has published on linguistics and translation theory. Her Hebrew translations of Rodrigues and Belbel were published and staged in Tel Aviv several times. Her latest English translation is Zarchi and Modan’s The Mermaid in the Bathtub.