Upcoming Kundiman Events:

Radical Afterlives: translation craft class with Rohan Chhetri

NOvember 5th, 2022
Saturday, 2:00 PM–5:00 PM ET

In this class we’ll look at translations as radical “afterlives” of texts to see what can be “found” in the act of translating. Moving beyond the question of fidelity, the binary of “faithful” and “free” translations and the myth of the "invariant", we'll look at translations as an opportunity to write through the source text into creating exciting & radical new works in the target language. Following the Hermeneutic mode of understanding a translation as an "interpretation" of the source text, we'll look at how the cadence and peculiarities of the source language and culture inflects, infiltrates and contaminates the target language, English in our case. We'll finally consider the interpretive factors—the various negotiations a translator makes to facilitate and contain this violent meeting of the two languages and cultures into their translation. We’ll begin the class with discussing examples of translations and excerpts provided to the students in advance. The second half of the class will consist of discussing the students’ sample translations honing in on specific “problems” and the methodologies used to arrive at the translations. The excerpts from the reading material may range from Don Mee Choi's Translation is a Mode=Translation is an Anti-Neocolonial Mode, Daisy Rockwell's translation of Geetanjali Shree's Tomb of Sand, Johannes Göransson’s Transgressive Circulation to poems from Vivek Narayanan's After and examples from my own ongoing translation of Avinash Shrestha's poems from the Nepali.

eligibility:

This craft class is open to all writers of color. The non-refundable tuition fee is $50. This craft class will be held over Zoom. There are scholarship spots available. The scholarship deadline is Friday, October 14th.

REGISTRATION FOR THIS CLASS IS NOW CLOSED.