Lecture Series 2007

Professor John Felstiner, Stanford University
Marilyn Gaddis Rose Lecture, ATA Conference 2007, San Francisco
Friday, November 2, 2007, 10:00 a.m.

TITLE

“The News from Translation: Some Emergent Occasions”

ABSTRACT

Inspired by William Carlos Williams, “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there,” I’ll be culling four decades to get news from the practice of translation, from occasions when happenstance surprised me beyond the basic task into personal, cultural, and political recognitions: translating Neruda’s “deathbed” verses during the coup or Chile’s folksinger Violeta Parra for Joan Baez, singing a Hebrew source of Celan’s for his widow Gisèle or adopting his fraught love poems to my own anniversaries, getting a Yehuda Amichai war poem into English (!) for my Jerusalem Hebrew teacher when she lost her son, 30 years later discovering a Celan-Amichai exchange of letters, recovering a Neruda ode for Denise Levertov when she’d misremembered it from her wartime England, futilely feeding Rilke’s most famous line to Alfred Kazin. All this means to instill our usual task of rendering and teaching with some unusual instances, some occupational hazards and fringe benefits of the craft.

BIO

John Felstiner has published The Lies of Art: Max Beerbohm's Parody and Caricature (1972), Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu (1980), which won the Commonwealth Club Gold Medal, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (1995), which won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism and was a NBCC Finalist, Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan (2001), which won ATA, MLA, and PEN prizes, and Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology (2001). His Neruda and Celan translations won British Comparative Literature Association prizes. He has held Guggenheim, Rockefeller, NEH, and NEA fellowships, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Felstiner has been at Stanford since 1965, and taught at the University of Chile, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Yale. His upcoming book, So Much Depends, concerns poetry and environmental urgency. Essay-chapters have appeared in various magazines, and six are running in American Poetry Review during 2007. Last spring a brace of essays on translation came out in two lines and Translation Review.