Posts filed under 'pedagogy'

To Learn the Wider World: The Summer 2021 Educator’s Guide

Stories set in other places and cultures, written in different languages, widen the world; I try to bring that feeling into the classroom.

Since its inception in 2016, the Educational Arm has developed instructional materials to accompany select pieces from the nonfiction, fiction, poetry, drama, and visual sections of each issue of Asymptote. Now with twenty Educator’s Guides in our archive, and over one hundred lesson plans based on translations from over fifty different languages, teachers can truly experience the world with their students. We encourage educators to explore the myriad of ways Asymptote content can be adapted and used in their curriculums; most lessons can be readily applied in literature courses at the high school or university level, but are also flexible enough to be adapted for a variety of humanities classes such as English, creative writing, cultural studies, and modern languages. They can also be easily applied to engage lifelong learners at community centers or arts organizations.

The Summer 2021 Educator’s Guide features lesson plans based on a diverse array of texts from the latest issue of Asymptote, including nonfiction translated from Czech and Spanish, poetry from Brazil and Iceland, and visual art inspired by China and the U.S. In these lessons, students are invited to observe urban life through the lens of psychogeography; explore the multifaceted relationship between art, memory, and cultural identity; research poets and critically examine the concept of literary canon; and delve into the translation process while reflecting on their own experiences reading works in translation. We hope that the Educator’s Guide will serve as a springboard for the use of world literature in your own classroom.

In this following roundtable, four members of the Educational Arm—representing a variety of teaching contexts—sit down for a discussion about the Educator’s Guide. Anna Rumsby (English language teaching, U.K./Germany), Mary Hillis (English language teaching, Japan), Kent Kosack (creative writing, U.S.), and Kasia Bartoszynska (literature, U.S.) discuss their favorite lessons from previous Educator’s Guides—why they chose the pieces in question, how they adapted them, with additional discourse on teaching through the pandemic and the importance of reading world literature.

Mary Hillis (MH): How does translated literature fit into your teaching practice? Have you taught any lessons from the Educator’s Guide, or do you have any favorite lessons from previous guides?

Anna Rumsby (AR): I teach English to German speakers; most of my lessons revolve around the German school system, and therefore involve rather more pedestrian areas such as grammar and traditional style essays. As a relatively new addition to the Education Arm, I was deeply impressed and invigorated by the creative freedoms we enjoy in producing the incredibly unique material at hand, working from some incredibly talented authors and translators. It definitely highlighted what had sometimes been lacking for me in my other work. I suppose that, in a way, working on the Educator’s Guide means I can design lessons which I would love to teach, rather than those I teach day to day.

In the Fall 2020 Educator’s Guide, I was particularly struck by the lesson plan called “Writing About What is Lost,” on “Living Trees and Dying Trees” by Itō Hiromi, translated by Jon L. Pitt. I am a great lover of both folklore and the botanical world; my MA dissertation involves a lot of Black Forest folklore, and my partner is a gardener, so the exercise on the importance and meaning of trees in Japanese culture really struck me. It reminded me of strolling through botanical gardens in the pre-COVID age, being told the Latin names and significance of all the trees I pointed at. I love how the lesson plan uses Itō Hiromi’s work as a springboard for further research, which in turn explores specific topics in more depth.

Kent Kosack (KK): I’m glad you mentioned “Writing about What is Lost.” It’s a great example of what teaching world literature and literary translation can do—letting the students explore a different place, a culture or sensibility, and using it to learn more about the wider world. By the end of the lesson, they’re making connections to their own lives and—in this case—reflecting on what’s been lost. It’s difficult work, but especially during this pandemic, necessary and potentially cathartic.  READ MORE…

An Architect of Words: Mahmoud Rezvani on the Decade-long Translation of Golestan

All we can do is do a better job translating our poets instead of picking on others for what a poor job they might have done in the past.

For all its punishing workload, translation can be a thankless task, and translators are often the unsung heroes. This is especially true when it comes to breathing fresh air into a work of medieval literature wherein the translator perseveres with a bygone zeitgeist that challenges his artistic and literary prowess alike. To say that writing and translation are inextricably linked is to state the obvious. Sometimes, however, the translator needs to reexamine the history through the lens of literature and vice versa. The most ingenious translators aren’t the ones who faithfully rewrite the original work in the target language, but those who creatively reimagine it as well. In doing so, they might have to gingerly zigzag their way through a stilted language drenched in obsolete words that nevertheless communicate timeless ideas. In one such case, Mahmoud Rezvani, an Iranian scholar, teacher, and literary translator, has been able to do exactly that—bringing Sa’di’s Golestan, a work of classic Persian literature, to life in all its austere grandeur by preserving the rhyme in the poems and the musicality in the rhymed prose in ways never done before.   

Abu-Muhammad Muslih al-Din bin Abdalah Shirazi, better known as Sa’di, was a thirteenth century Persian poet whose plangent poetry and compassion for humanity once received effusive encomium from the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Even the oft-quoted opening lines of Whitman’s Leaves of GrassI celebrate myself, and sing myself / And what I assume you shall assume / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you—have arguably been inspired by Sa’di’s timeless bani adam poem.

Rezvani is sixty-six now, with a salt-and-pepper handlebar mustache and a gregarious affect. He first began teaching in 1971 at the age of seventeen, and has since taught through such turbulent times as the Islamic Revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, and now the COVID-19 pandemic. “I still remember the very first air strike in Tehran during the war,” he says, “and I even remember what exactly I was teaching that day.” Still, Rezvani has never relinquished his sanguine attitude over the years. In the classroom, he is well known for his exuberance, oratorical bravura, and improvisational teaching style. Beyond that, his Renaissance-man bona fides—he has had serious grounding in math, Persian calligraphy, awaz (traditional Persian singing), literature, and martial arts—are also worth noting, most of which have served him well in his preparation for translating Sa’di.

Starting in 2008, the translation took Rezvani ten good years to finish. In March 2016, in an interview with Exchanges: Journal of Literary Translation, he cited “love” as the most important driving force behind his labor. That same month, he gave a first public reading of his translation at the University of California, Berkeley. Among the attendees were former US poet-laureate Robert Hass and his wife, poet Brenda Hillman, a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, both of whom applauded the decade-long effort. Since then, Rezvani’s translation has been endorsed by UNESCO and published—quite apropos to Sa’di’s hometown—by the University of Shiraz.

Our conversation took place on two separate occasions, and with diametrically opposite vibes. For the first part of the interview, I met Rezvani at his office after his last online class of the day which had ended around 10 pm. He was characteristically lively and rather voluble in his responses. For the second part, however, a somber mood was on full display during our discussion, following the death of Grand Maestro Mohammad-Reza Shajarian—Iran’s most internationally recognized awaz songster—who happened to be Rezvani’s longtime and beloved friend.

Siavash Saadlou (SS): How did the decision to translate Golestan come about? Why did you begin in 2008 and not sooner or later? 

Mahmoud Rezvani (MR): I considered translating Golestan several times, but I was too afraid to give it a shot. Part of this had to do with my perfectionist nature, and part of it had to do with the enormity of the task. But an interesting incident gave me the belief that I could translate Golestan after all. About twenty years ago, Mohammad Hoghooghi, the late poet and literary critic, had a niece living in the United States who was getting married. He had written a letter in Persian for the wedding, and he needed someone to translate it into English, since his niece understood very little Persian. The letter was filled with purple prose, and Mr. Hoghooghi couldn’t find the right translator for the job. One day, he came to my language institute and asked if I could translate the letter. When I did translate the letter, it became somewhat of a sensation in small literary circles in the US at the time. Flash forward six months, Mr. Hoghooghi invited me to a get-together where many renowned Iranian translators were present. The moment I entered, he introduced me to everyone as “the one who translated the impossible,” and this served as a huge confidence-builder for me. That was the first time I seriously considered translating Golestan.

You asked me why I didn’t put off the translation until later, and I can only think of Sa’di’s own words from one of his poems, about how none of us can be sure if we would still be here in this world when the next spring comes around. That’s why I told myself, there’s no time like the present, and began to translate the book. When I first started working on Golestan, I never thought it would take me a decade to finish it. I still teach full-time, so I can’t solely focus on translation. When I was working on Golestan, I mostly translated on Thursday afternoons sitting in my office. Sometimes I used to translate as many as ten or twenty lines at a time, and other times I struggled with one particular page, even a single word, for days.  READ MORE…

Dulces Sueños, Don Quixote

Reciprocal listening—everyone listening to everyone—had become more important than ever. There was an entire world that needed to be heard.

One of the most devastating outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic was the damage it inflicted on the education of children worldwide. As schools shut their doors and valued programs reluctantly halted, both kids and their educators were cut off from their communities and, for some, their places of refuge. In the following essay, assistant blog editor Edwin Alanís-García shares his experience working with one of these programs and spaces in New York City, a literary haven fittingly called Still Waters in a Storm.

The Traveling Serialized Adventures of Kid Quixote is a modern-day musical reimagining of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, of which the translators and performers are a community of young writers and thinkers ranging in age from seven to sixteen. To call this project “ambitious” would be an understatement—Traveling Adventures is a thorough reinterpretation of a four-hundred-year-old masterpiece of Hispanophone literature, being adapted into songs, theater performances, and even metafictional meditations on social justice, immigration, and the process of translation itself. It is a translation project years in the making, and the children were finally ready to present the first installments to the world.

Their visit to my alma mater was a confluence of the two literary worlds I’d known in New York City: the MFA program at New York University, and the sanctuary of Still Waters in a Storm, an after-school program in the working-class neighborhood of Bushwick, Brooklyn. I volunteered at Still Waters during my last year of study, and was lucky to have witnessed the genesis of Traveling Adventures.

On a Friday morning in February, 2018, I took a train from Cambridge, MA to Boston’s South Station. The five-hour bus ride from Boston to New York stopped just a few blocks shy of the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers’ House in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, a literary landmark in a city of literature, and a space that has welcomed many of the world’s greatest poets and writers. It was a fitting venue for the Kid Quixotes. Though the performance space was smaller than some of the college classrooms and theater stages they’d been using on the tour, that intimacy provided a near theater-in-the-round experience. As one young performer described it, it felt more like doing a show in someone’s living room.

Friends and teachers spilled into the parlor. We sat close to the “stage,” a blocked-in area designated by the performers. At this distance, we weren’t just spectators, we were participants in a tale that began in seventeenth-century Spain and continued into twenty-first-century New York. The frame story begins with our protagonist (played by eight-year-old actor and author Sarah Sierra) being called to bed by her mother. Young Sarah wants to stay awake and read Don Quixote—she wants to become Don Quixote. In doing so, she adopts the persona of Kid Quixote, protector of the abused and oppressed. The dialogue is in Spanish, but quickly becomes bilingual when the scenes from the novel come to life. As she walks to school, Kid Quixote jumps into a scene from Chapter IV; a farmer is whipping a boy, and she cannot abide this injustice. What would be a horrifying scene of violence is reimagined by the children into an act of resistance, and the cruel farmer is made to look like a fool. Kid Quixote’s mission to help the downtrodden is set to “The Rescuing Song,” a plea and a promise to help those in need of protection. It is a song about belonging, and ultimately about “home.”

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Section Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2018

Don’t know where to start with our Fall 2018 issue? Here are the stand-out pieces, according to our section editors.

The brand new Fall 2018 issue of Asymptote was released last week and we are still enjoying its diverse offerings from 31 countries, including a Special Feature on Catalan fiction. After the blog editors posted their highlights two days ago, the quarterly magazine’s section editors share their favorites from this season’s haul: 

What good is French today? After years of patient apprenticeship, and years of mastery, perhaps writing in French was only a means of escape, or a way of doing battle. These are the questions that Abdellah Taïa battles with, in ‘To Love and to Kill: Why Do I Write In French?’ Beautifully translated by Hodna Bentali Gharsallah Nuernberg, Taïa’s essay attacks the French language, with great vigor and style, and—of course—in French. In a succinct essay, Taïa adroitly sets out the class politics of speaking French in Morocco, and the satisfactions (and oblivions) of conquering a language and a place, and all the complicated forms of hatred (and self-hatred) that come with it.

—Joshua Craze, Nonfiction editor

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In Conversation: Natasha Wimmer on Teaching Translation

Teaching translation feels like I’ve been lifting weights, and then I go to my own translation and it's like, whoa, these weights are so light!

What does it mean to teach translation? Many translators are self-taught, having honed their skills in careers as writers or editors, academics or language experts. But some universities in the United States also offer seminars in the craft of translation. The teacher-translator, then, takes on the unique challenge of developing new pedagogy for a field in flux, one that exists at the intersection of language study, theory, and the instructor’s own experiences in the creative practice of translation.

Today, translator Natasha Wimmer sits down with her former student and Asymptote Editor-at-Large in Brazil, Lara Norgaard, to discuss her approach to teaching translation. 

Lara Norgaard (LN): How did you begin teaching translation? What made you interested in education?

Natasha Wimmer (NW): Princeton approached me, actually. I had never taught a class. Not only that, but I also only have an undergraduate degree, so I had never even taken a graduate class. I was a little bit nervous about taking the job. A few years later I started at Columbia. In that case, I did a panel discussion with the other Bolaño translator, Chris Andrews, and the department heads enjoyed the discussion, so they asked me to teach.

LN: Was there a particular class you took or text you read that influenced the way you approached teaching for the first time?

NW: I actually imagined the course as the class I wish I’d taken before I became a translator. I had no formal education in translation at all. I had never taken a translation class and, in fact, I hadn’t even read anything about translation until about eight years into my translation career. When I was asked to give a talk about translation, I realized I had avoided reading about translation because I was afraid that I would discover that I had been doing it wrong, or that maybe I would mess with the instinctive approach that had somehow been successful so far. But then I found reading about translation really stimulating. I discovered that, not surprisingly, there was a conversation about the questions I had and about the things that I hadn’t articulated but had been working through as a translator.

I worked really hard the first year I taught the Princeton class. I spent a few months just reading translation theory and translation essays for material that I thought was interesting and put together a reading list. The first semester I taught at Princeton was very experimental. In retrospect, I’m surprised I survived. The format of the class changed a lot from the first year to the second.

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Assignment: Translate Your Prose into Verse

Michael Odom on translation, poems, and pedagogy in the classroom.

“…it gave me a devil of a lot of trouble to get into verse the poems that I will read for you tonight, and that is why I will not read them as if they were prose!”

-W.B. Yeats

 

All reading is translation: translation from the language of one mind to the language of another. The worst possible translation is one that takes a great poem in one language and makes of it a terrible poem in another. For example, the translation in a student’s mind of “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may” into “Memento mori!” is a ‘lost in translation’ reading. This occurred to me as I tried to teach university freshmen the correct terms for genres, prosodies, tropes, and dictions.

My students recited verse as if it were an unusually unmusical type of prose. They could not hear it and they could not conceive of lineation as anything but an odd way to write sentences. They droned as they read, flattening every stress and evening out tones as they raced from the initial capital to the period of the last sentence. Their close reading was the same: racing past language to ‘the meaning’. Verse as weird prose; as if poetry were a gameshow where a writer says something cryptic or enigmatic and readers try to guess what was said. Readers who guess right win a PhD. Poets who stump the audience take home an MFA. My students seemed to think the consolation prize would be an easy A.

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