Reading
Spring 2025 Volunteer and Intern Potluck and Reading
Metaphors of clarity and darkness abound in discussions around the politics of literary translation. A distrust of visibility and simplicity—in many ways the product of modernism’s self-avowed gestures of resistance to commodification—has often led to the championing of the obscure or untranslatable. At the same time, the charge of untranslatability has historically served to cordon off certain languages and literary genres from the realm of the commensurate: a gesture with significant ethical and aesthetic consequences. When the Arabic language, for instance, is repeatedly depicted as rhetorical, strange and potentially deranged, what creative options are made unavailable to the translator? Conversely, when revolutionary poems in a language like Spanish (associated with cultural poverty in the mainstream imagination) are categorized as “simple,” what sort of vision of political literature gets reproduced? Through study and creative exercises, this workshop will explore the possibilities of dislodging the opposition between transparency and opacity. Can we conjure up new metaphorical paradigms for thinking about the relationship between linguistic surface and political gesture?
