TRANSLATION AND MULTILINGUALISM
Spring 2010 Events
We are organizing a series of events this semester centered on the concept and practice of translation. The focus is on contemporary writing that takes on questions of multilingualism, identity, and trans-national writing.
Co-sponsored by the Cogut Center for the Humanities, Departments of Comparative Literature, East Asian Studies, German Studies, Literary Arts, and Slavic Languages
1) Visit by Prof. John Namjun Kim
Assistant Professor, German/Japanese/Comparative Literature
University of California, Riverside
John Namjun Kim specializes in critical theory and modern German and Japanese literature and philosophy. His areas of research and teaching include Kant and German Idealism, Classicism and Romanticism, modern Japanese philosophy (the Kyoto School), postwar literatures of migration, the biopolitics of manufacturing ethnic minorities, translation and multilingualism. He is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Free to Die: Life in the Common from German Idealism to Imperial Japan, which examines the appropriation of German philosophemes of “freedom” by wartime Japanese philosophers seeking to justify its presumed antithesis: imperial expansion and colonial subjugation.
His lecture at Brown draws from his second book project, Ethnic Irony: The Political Poetics of Migrating Borders, on the conjunction of literary irony and the politics of migration in postcolonial Western Europe. He has published articles on topics such as Kant, Foucault, Tawada, Japanese imperialism, and non-hermeneutic approaches to translation. He also serves on the editorial collective of Traces: A Multilingual Series of Cultural Theory and Translation, currently published in Chinese, English, Korean and Japanese language editions, as well as the co-founder of its forthcoming German language edition.
A. Lecture:
Ethnic Irony: Tawada, de Man and the Poetics of Migrating Borders
Thu, March 4th, 5:30pm
Maddock Alumni Center, Brian RoomB. Workshop:
The Biopolitics of Translation in the Poetry of Yoko Tawada
We will read and discuss some pre-circulated poems by Tawada in translation and original (German and Japanese), along with one theoretical essay on biopolitics and translation.
Reading 1: Sakai / Solomon, "Addressing the Multitude of Foreigners, Echoing Foucault"
Reading 2: Poems by Yoko Tawada
Fri, March 5th, Noon - 2:00pm
Marston Hall 209
Lunch provided, and pre-registration required with zachary_sng@brown.edu.
2) Visit by Award-Winning Poet, Yoko Tawada
Yoko Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960, educated at Waseda University and has lived in Germany since 1982, where she received her Ph.D. in German literature. She received the prestigious Akutagawa Prize – Japan’s equivalent of a Booker or a Pulitzer – for The Bridegroom Was a Dog. She writes in both German and Japanese, and in 1996, she won the Adalbert-von-Chamisso Prize, a German award recognizing foreign writers for their contributions to German culture. She also received the Goethe-Medal, an official decoration of the Federal Republic of Germany.
A. Poetry Workshop:
The poetry workshop participants will discuss Tawada’s texts in the original and translations into Czech, English, German, Japanese, and Russian, and observe with the author fascinating processes such as shifts in perception, conceptual mutation, and creation of new meaning.
Mon, April 5th at Noon
190 Hope St, Rm 103B. Poetry Reading
"Translated Faces, Liquefied Letters"
Tawada's reading will be a collage of poems and prose texts on the theme of polyphony and multilingualism. Different texts will be read in Chinese, Czech, English, French, German, Japanese, French and Russian. The audience will experience and participate in the sounds of familiar and unfamiliar voices and languages and will observe how texts communicate with one another and give rise to newer meanings and images.Mon, April 5th at 5 pm
190 Hope St, Rm 103