THE OAKLEY CENTERSaturday November 10th 2012, 10 a.m. – 4 p.m.

The Right Side of the Tapestrya conversation on translation

THE OAKLEY CENTER was established in 1985 to support research and inquiry across the humanities and social sciences.

The center hosts events each year that facilitate intellectual exchange and collaboration across disciplinary boundaries.

Schedule saturday, nov 10th

10:00 a.m. – 11:45 a.m.

Panelists Aurora Lauzardo, Vicente Rafael & Sarah Ruden*Moderated by Christopher Bolton, Associate Professor of Comparative and Japanese Literature

Noon – 1:45 p.m. Break

2:00 p.m. – 3:45 p.m.

Panelists Matthew Fraleigh, Na’ama Rokem & Shawkat Toorawa*Moderated by Christopher Nugent, Associate Professor of Chinese

Note that seating is limited; kindly RSVP to oakleycenter@williams.edu by Friday, Nov. 2, if you wish to attend, and we will promptly inform you of availability. Oakley Center for the Humanities & Social Sciences

90 Denison Park DriveWilliamstown, MA 01267

PHOTO Soledad Fox

PANELIST BIOSPANEL 1

AURORA LAUZARDOAurora Lauzardo is Professor at the College of Humanities, University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus. She was Associate Dean of Graduate Studies and Research from 2002 to 2006 and Chair of the Graduate Program in Translation from 2006-2011. Since November 2010 she has been Coordinator of Faculty Initiatives of a Title V grant to develop undergraduate research at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus.She has trans-lated literary, academic and audiovisual works. She is currently working on the Spanish translation of Dr. Astrid Cubano's book Rituals of Violence in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico: Individual Conflict, Gender, and the Law. 

VICENTE L. RAFAELVicente L. Rafael is Professor of History at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is the author of several works on colonial and post-colonial Philippines that focus on the questions of translation and the technologies of power. He has also writ-ten on the politics of language and translation in US imperial history. Rafael’s current research has to do with the relationship between translation and war. One part examines the US military’s on-going attempt to weaponize translation in its current “global war on terror.” The other part consists of a study of the colonial and post-colonial legacy of English in the Philippines predicated on a “war of translation” waged against the vernacular languages, including Spanish.

SARAH RUDENSarah Ruden has taught at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Her scholarship has concentrated on literary translation of the Greek and Roman classics: she has published translations of the Satyricon of Petronius (Hackett, 2000), Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (Hackett, 2003), the Homeric Hymns (Hackett, 2005), and Vergil’s Aeneid (Yale UP, 2008). She has been particularly concerned with making ancient literature clear, appealing, and informative for readers who have little or no background in ancient languages. Ruden was a 2010 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

PANEL 2

MATTHEW FRALEIGHMatthew Fraleigh is Assistant Professor of East Asian Literature and Culture at Brandeis University. A specialist in Sino-Japanese poetry and prose, his work has appeared in prominent journals. In 2010, Cornell published his annotated translation, New Chronicles of Yanagibashi and Diary of a Journey to the West: Narushima Ryūhoku Reports From Home and Abroad, which was awarded the Japan-US Friendship Commission Prize. In 2012, he received the William F. Sibley Memorial Translation Prize for his transla-tion of Ryūhoku's prison essay, "Super Secret Tales From the Slammer." He has recently completed a monograph entitled Plucking Chrysanthemums: Narushima Ryūhoku and the Uses of Chinese Tradition in Modern Japan.

NA’AMA ROKEMNa'ama Rokem is Assistant Professor of Modern Hebrew Literature at the University of Chicago. Her first book, Prosaic Conditions: Heinrich Heine and the Zionist Remaking of Literary Space (Northwestern University Press, forthcom-ing) argues that prose — as a figure of thought, a mode and a medium — played an instrumental role in the literary founda-tions of the Zionist revolution. Her current book project deals with bilingualism and auto-translation in German-Jewish and Hebrew literature. In 2011-2012, she was a faculty fellow at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan.

SHAWKAT TOORAWAShawkat M. Toorawa has taught Arabic at Duke University, medieval French literature and Indian Ocean studies at the University of Mauritius, and worked in a family import/export company in Kuala Lumpur and Port-Louis. In 2000, he joined Cornell University, where he is currently Associate Professor of Arabic Literature and Islamic Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Studies. His current research and teaching interests include: the Qu’ranic lexicon, in particular hapaxes and rhyme-words; the literary and writerly culture of Abbasid Baghdad; the southwest Indian Ocean; the 18th century Indian author, Azad Bilgrami; the poetry of the modern Syro-Lebanese poet Adonis; and the Creole-language Mauritian author Dev Virahsawmy. He is a Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellow; and Co-Executive Editor of the Library of Arabic Literature, an initiative to edit and translate the premodern Arabic literary heritage.

“[I]t seems to me that translation from one language into another, unless it is from Greek and Latin, the queens of all languages, is like looking at Flemish tapestries from the wrong side, for although the figures are visible, they are covered by threads that obscure them, and cannot be seen with the smoothness and color of the right side [.] ” 1

1 Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, translated by Edith Grossman (HarperCollins 2003) 873.

These are Don Quixote’s comments on translation, and he expresses here a basic anxiety known to many of us when we read a translation:“What am I losing?”

Yet before we can even attempt to answer this, we find that we must ask other questions that focus and enrich this initial query. After all, if we are losing something, then we have to agree that there was an original, agreed upon meaning to lose — and that is where things become very interesting.

In this Oakley Center event we have the privilege of conver-sing with six groundbreaking scholars and practitioners of translation who will offer us new perspectives on one of the most intriguing ways in which we communicate.

It is a pleasure to invite you to engage in a dialogue with our distinguished guests who will present a wide range of issues — always within a specific context — to help us understand the many natures and functions of translation.