Blog: Review: The UGARIT Translation Alignment Editor
By ToriLee | July 24, 2023
Odysseus Shot First: Signs of Differing Traditions in Odyssey 16-22
By ToriLee | July 5, 2023
Blog: Translation at the SCS
By Richard Armstrong | February 15, 2023
Blog: “Can We Strangle the Muse?”: Carson and Bruno’s The Trojan Women
By Christopher Trinacty | July 23, 2021
By Christopher Trinacty, Emma Glen, and Emily Hudson (Oberlin College)
Anne Carson’s celebrated adaptations and translations of Ancient Greek and Latin literature have ranged from imagining the love affair between Geryon and Heracles in The Autobiography of Red to meditating about the death of her brother through Catullus 101 in Nox. In our opinion, Carson’s works highlight her theoretical sophistication as well as her deep commitment to the reception of Classics broadly understood. This new “comic” version of Euripides’ Trojan Women by Carson and illustrator Rosanna Bruno offers a creative and challenging take on Euripides’s tragedy.
Blog: The Grammar of our Discontent: Ovid, Wishes, and the Virtual Term
By Hilary Lehmann | September 7, 2020
Unattainable wishes for the present or past may be entirely reasonable.
– Smyth’s Greek Grammar, “Wishes” §2156.5
Picture the heroine in the sand, wind-lashed and desperate, cursing the hero who left her behind. She’s Medea, she’s Ariadne, she’s Dido. Each of the three make a similar wish:
Blog: The Art of Translation: An Interview with Jinyu Liu
By Adrienne Rose | April 15, 2020
In her ‘art of translation’ column, Adrienne K.H. Rose interviews Jinyu Liu, Professor of Classical Studies at Depauw University, about translating texts across cultures, Ovid, and the translation space as a “contact zone.”
Blog: Can a New Journal Modify the Way We Teach and Understand Classical Translations?
By Adrienne Rose | November 8, 2019
What is the interplay between Classics and literary translation? What are the preparatory actions for launching a new journal that will address problems and lacunae within the field? Adrienne K.H. Rose explores the challenges of beginning a translation journal which will address the philosophies, difficulties, and necessity for diversity within the area of classical translation.
Blog: The Art of Translation: An Interview with Poet Aaron Poochigian
By Christopher Trinacty | March 29, 2019
Aaron Poochigian is a poet and translator based in New York City. After receiving his PhD in Classics from the University of Minnesota in 2006 (with a dissertation on “The Staging of Aeschylus’ Persians, Seven Against Thebes, and Suppliants”), Aaron pursued a career translating Ancient Greek poetry and composing his own. His poetry has been featured in Best American Poetry 2018 (eds. Lehman and Gioia), Poetry, and Poems Out Loud. His collection, Manhattanite, won the Able Muse Book Award for Poetry (2017) and features such wonderful verses as these, about a blizzard:
Doomed, though, like ice is doomed, this wicked bright
Seagull Behemoth soon must furl his gusts
and die the same slow way the drifts accrued,
Blog: Valuing Classical Translations for Outreach, Diversity, and Art
By Diane Rayor | January 31, 2019
Literary translation is a scholarly and a creative act in which a reader of the Greek or Latin becomes the writer for new readers. Like all readers, translators interpret the text, and in the field of classics, apply their scholarship and their poetic abilities to put the text into a modern language. Since many readers of our translations cannot read the original, they depend on us to transmit the voice of the original writer and to be transparent in our choices. By that I mean that the translator should proclaim whether the translation is aiming for accuracy (and what that means in particular), whether it adds or subtracts from the source text (such as Richmond Lattimore inserting his own lines into Sappho’s fragments), whether the work is an adaptation rather than a translation (clearly proclaimed in Luis Alfaro’s “Mojada: A Medea in Los Angelos”).
Blog: The Art of Translation: An interview with A.E. Stallings
By Adrienne Rose | September 27, 2018
This month in her ‘art of translation’ column, Adrienne K.H. Rose interviews A.E. Stallings while in Pylos and then in Virginia. The two discuss the word choices made by translators, the surprising relevance of Archaic poetry in the tumultuous present era, and the effects of living life in a foreign language.
Q: How did you decide to study Classics?
Gradually, then suddenly—I didn't start taking Latin until college [at the University of Georgia], where I was initially an English and Music major, but I started with Latin 1, and just kept taking more and more Latin and Classics courses until finally the department (in particular Rick LaFleur, then Dept. head), gently suggested I change majors.
Q: Could you say a bit about the significance of learning Latin and Greek and translating Classics and its impact on you?