COMPLIT 111Q: Texts and Contexts: Spanish/English Literary Translation Workshop
Please note that this course is taught in Spanish and is a core course for the Translation Studies minor.
Course Description
The Argentinian writer and translator, Jorge Luis Borges, once said, “Cada idioma es un modo de sentir el universo.” How are modes of feeling and perception translated across languages? How does the historical context of a work condition its translation into and out of a language? In this course, you will translate from a variety of genres that will teach you the practical skills necessary to translate literary texts from Spanish to English and English to Spanish. By the end of the term, you will have translated and received feedback on a project of your own choosing. Discussion topics may include: the importance of register, tone, and audience; the gains and losses that translations may introduce; the role of ideological, social-political, and aesthetic factors on the production of translations; and comparative syntaxes, morphologies, and semantic systems. Preference will be given to sophomores but first-year students through seniors have enjoyed this course in the past.
Meet the Instructor: Cintia Santana
"I teach in the Comparative Literature, English, and Iberian and Latin American Cultures Departments at Stanford. I’m also a word-nerd; the title of my poetry collection, The Disordered Alphabet, likely gives that away! As a Spanish-English bilingual, I grew up fascinated by the different expressive possibilities that languages afford speakers, as well as the constraints they impose. My interests include poetry, transatlantic and translation studies, and interdisciplinary arts. I’m passionate about teaching students to think critically and creatively about language usage and translation. As a recipient of the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize, I like to think that this passion translates to my students. My book, Forth and Back: Translation, Dirty Realism, and The Spanish Novel, 1975-1995, investigates the literary, economic, and socio-political factors that conditioned a translation boom of U.S. literature in Spain after the end of Franco’s 39-year dictatorship. My short stories, poems, and translations have appeared in the Kenyon Review, The Harvard Review, The Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Missouri Review, Narrative, Pleiades, The Threepenny Review, and other journals. In recent years I’ve developed a visual arts practice which includes poetry-based installations."
