German Studies Program, Division of Languages and Literature, and Bard Translation and Translatability Initiative Present

CANCELED Translation as Pedagogy: A Manifesto for Reading

“To translate is to surpass the source”— these are words Sophie Seita puts into the mouth of a character in her performance My Little Enlightenment Plays, a project in which she rewrites, translates, responds to, and, one could say, corresponds with Enlightenment thinkers and writers and other historical source materials.

In her talk, Seita will propose an expansive understanding of translation: translation as an inventive, generative, and often collaborative practice; translation as a form of writing-as-reading; and translational reading as a pedagogical tool.

She writes: “Like a manifesto, I see translation as a deeply pedagogical form. In my teaching, I promote what I would call ‘translational reading,’ which tries to understand a text by doing something with it. Following Sara Ahmed’s terminology in her manifesto‘Living a Feminist Life,’ translation would have to be in my ‘feminist survival kit.’ Translation, for me, then encompasses the moving of matter from one place to another. This might mean transforming a word, sentence, image, idea, or material (like paper, Tippex, or clay) into another form, genre, medium, or context.”

Seita will discuss these theoretical ideas with a view to how they might work in practice in the context of her own translational projects, from text- and performance-based work to pedagogical experiments.

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For more information, call 845-758-7363, or e-mail [email protected].

Time: 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4

Location: Olin Humanities, Room 102

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