Literary Translation and the Making of Originals

A conversation with Karen Emmerich, associate professor of comparative literature, Princeton University

Literary Translation and the Making of Originals engages such issues as the politics and ethics of translation; how aesthetic categories and market forces contribute to the establishment and promotion of particular “originals”; and the role translation plays in the formation, re-formation, and deformation of national and international literary canons. By challenging the assumption that stable originals even exist, Karen Emmerich also calls into question the tropes of ideal equivalence and unavoidable loss that contribute to the low status of translation, translations, and translators in the current literary and academic marketplaces.

Karen Emmerich is associate professor of comparative literature at Princeton University and a translator of modern Greek poetry and prose. She has published 10 books of Greek literature in translation, and her academic work has appeared in journals such as Arion, Translation Studies and the Journal of Modern Greek Studies.

Please contact Olivia Lott (OLIVIALOTT@WUSTL.EDU) for the link to join the Zoom.