Translating Across Race and Gender, Part 2

In this two-part panel, translators will discuss questions of ethics and power when translating texts by authors and/or with characters whose racial and/or gender identity differs from the translator’s.

Panelists will address issues such as: how can translators approach the work of authors whose experiences with race and gender are not their own with care and humility? How do translators handle misogyny in texts? How do translators of color manage assumptions about which literatures they translate? How can translators convey frameworks of race and gender that are different from the dominant Anglo-American ones?

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Moderator

Corine Tachtirisis Assistant Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She primarily translates the work of contemporary women authors from the Francophone Caribbean, Africa, and Canada as well as the Czech Republic. She is also completing a scholarly monograph entitled Translating Race.

Presenters

Nathan H. Dize is a PhD candidate in the Department of French and Italian at Vanderbilt University. He is the content curator, translator, and co-editor of the digital history project A Colony in Crisis: The Saint-Domingue Grain Shortage of 1789. With Siobhan Meï, he coedits the “Haiti in Translation” interview series for H-Haiti. He has translated poetry and fiction by numerous Haitian authors, including Kettly Mars, Charles Moravia, James Noël, Néhémy Pierre-Dahomey, and Évelyne Trouillot. His translation of Makenzy Orcel’s The Immortals is forthcoming in November 2020 with SUNY Press. Jamie Richards is a translator and editor based in Milan, where she works for the Balzan Foundation. She has translated numerous contemporary Italian writers and cartoonists, including Igiaba Scego, Gabriella Kuruvilla, Andrea Inglese, Zerocalcare, Gipi, and Manuele Fior. Her latest translation is Ermanno Cavazzoni’s Brief Lives of Idiots, coming soon from Wakefield Press, and she is currently working on Dolores Prato’s Down the Square No One’s There for Farrar, Straus & Giroux. She holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Oregon. Stephanie McCarter has recently published a verse translation of the Roman poet Horace’s Odes and Epodes (University of OklahomaPress) and is currently working on a translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses into iambic pentameter for Penguin Classics. She is Associate Professor of Classics at theUniversity of the South in Tennessee.