Accent Craftclass | Translation Beyond Crisis: Automation, Bilingual Labor, and Anticipatory Practice
Translation Beyond Crisis: Experiments with Automation, Bilingual Labor, and Anticipatory Practice
This craftclass explores the generative potential of translation. How does translation as a mode of textual production seep into other forms of creative output? This masterclass addresses the breaches between translation studies and translation practice, moving away from familiar tropes of ‘invisibility’ and ‘fidelity’ to consider some of the more irreverent and experimental translation practices that color contemporary writing. In focusing on authors working across languages, generic conventions and national categories, I highlight a common interest in the materiality of language, effervescent creativity, and the power of word play and language games to subvert reader expectations and collapse literary canons. This talk will focus mostly on Chinese-English bilingualism, though no knowledge of Chinese is expected or required.
What kinds of literature emerge when we move past the anxieties of translation? This talk is an homage to the effervescent bilingual practice of contemporary writer/translators. Participants are invited to think through the generative potential of translation as it applies to their own writing and explore the concept of “anticipating translation” as a revision technique in their own creative practice in any language.
Primary Language: English, with examples translated from Chinese. Participants are welcome to use either English or Chinese during the interactive portion of the class.
Recommended Reading:
2023 Manifesto on Literary Translation
Rebecca Walkowitz, Born Translated
Karolina Watroba, World Literature and Literary Value: Is “Global” The New “Lowbrow?”
Michael Gibbs Hill, Lin Shu, Inc.
Jane Qian Liu, Transcultural Lyricism
Han Shaogong, A Dictionary of Maqiao (trans. Julia Lovell)
韩少功，马桥词典
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, (any translation)
费尔南多·佩索阿, 惶然录 (韩少功译）
Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars (trans. Christina Pribicevic-Zoric)
哈扎尔辞典, 米洛拉德·帕维奇 (韩少功译）
LdoD Archive
Hsia Yü, Pink Noise/ 夏宇， 粉红色噪音
小冰，眼光失了玻璃窗
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Kate Costello is a literary translator of Chinese poetry and an active member of American Translators Association (ATA), American Literary Translators Association (ALTA), and the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA). She holds a DPhil in modern Chinese literature and culture from Oxford University. Her first book project, Bilingual Experimentation, interrogates the relationship between bilingual writing and translation, and between linguistic experimentation and experimental form. Working across Chinese, French, and English, her research explores how translation as a mode of textual production seeps into broader creative output, often undetected by reading publics. In theorizing bilingual experimentation and the bilingual text, this project illuminates the way that multilingual competencies have shaped literary works that may at first blush appear to be monolingual texts.
Her translations have been featured in The Poetry Review, Indiana Review, Washington Square Review, the LA Review of Books China Channel, Paper Republic, Chinese Arts and Letters, and Quarterly Asia. Her translations have been anthologized in Writing in Difficult Times by Cart Noodles Press (reprinted by Columbia University Press), in the 2018 Seoul International Writer’s Festival Anthology, and One Way Street’s Beyond the City: A Collection of Non-Fiction from Modern China. Her book-length translation, Yau Noi: Selected Short Poems was published by Shanghai Wenyi in 2022. Kate has served on the working group for Pen America’s 2023 Manifesto on Literary Translation, as well as the organizing committee for the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation Research Programme. As of January 2024, she is serving on the Leadership Council for the ATA’s Literary Division.