The Department of Comparative Literature is pleased to invite graduating seniors in all departments at the University of Michigan to submit entries for our 2023 Senior Prize in Literary Translation. This prize is intended to encourage undergraduate students to develop projects in translating into English a literary text originally written in another language. 
 
Submissions are due by April 13th and will be judged by a team of faculty members in Comparative Literature. 

The prize will be awarded at the end of the winter term. The winner will be invited to read at the department’s graduation and awards ceremony on April 28th.

RULES

1. All seniors graduating in Summer 2022, Fall 2022, or Winter 2023, and affiliated with any department at the University of Michigan, are eligible to submit a translation.  

2. Students may choose to translate into English any literary text (or excerpt of a literary text) that was originally written in another language and in any literary genre (e.g. fiction, poetry, drama, creative nonfiction).  

3. A submission should consist of your translation (no more than 10 pages), and a brief translator’s preface (no more than 5 pages) that introduces the text and author you have chosen and explains your method of translation.  If you have worked significantly with previously available translations, glosses, or commentaries, please note these in your translator’s preface. Make sure your submission references all texts and tools you have used to produce your translation (i.e. other translations you have consulted, translation software you may have used, etc)

4. Please submit your translation in the following format: 

• an email listing your name, your graduation date, your major(s) and minor(s), and the complete title and author of the text you have translated,
• an email attachment without your namethat includes your translator’s prefaceand your translation, and
• a copy of the text you have translated in its original language.

5. Your submission should be emailed to complit.student.services@umich.edu no later than 11:59 PM on Thursday, April 13, 2023.

Check out the Comp Lit website for full instructions.

Questions? Contact complit.student.services@umich.edu

The Contexts for Classics steering committee is pleased to announce its 22nd annual Classical Translation Contest, which is intended to highlight the work of students interested in the process of translation as a creative enterprise.

This year, the contest will include languages taught in the departments of Classical Studies, Asian Languages and Cultures, and Middle East Studies.

Both graduate and undergraduate students from across the University of Michigan are invited to submit literary translations of texts from the following languages:

• Latin, Ancient Greek, and Modern Greek
• Classical Japanese, Chinese, and Sanskrit
• Akkadian, Assyrian, Coptic, Syriac, Biblical Hebrew, Hittite, Middle Egyptian, Sumerian, and Classical Armenian, Arabic, Persian, and Turkish

Please note that all submissions should consist of original translations and/or interpretations of works from these languages listed above.

General Guidelines
Translations can adopt different forms from those of their originals, including prose, verse, or other media. The maximum length of written submissions is five pages double spaced.

All submissions will be forwarded for anonymous judging to one of three panels of faculty members representing the departments listed above.

Deadline
Translations, along with a copy of the text that you have translated, should be submitted by 5pm ET on Thursday, March 30 2023, via email to Kathryn Colman at kmhorne@umich.edu as an attachment.

In the body of your email, please include:

• the title, author, and original language of the text you have translated
• your name
• an indication of whether you are an undergraduate (with title of major) or graduate student (with title of program)

Submissions are also allowed through Dropbox or Google Drive.

Prizes
In each category (undergraduate and graduate), the prizes will be $100 each.

Winners will be invited to publish their translations on the Contexts for Classics website.

“Blackness in Translation,” a virtual panel discussion with Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez and Ryan James Kernan, is happening on February 22, 2023, 4:30-6 pm EST. 

In this virtual panel and discussion, Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez (Michigan State University) and Ryan James Kernan (Rutgers University) will share their groundbreaking research on the literary and cultural translation of Blackness before engaging in a discussion moderated by Aaron Coleman, U-M’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Critical Translation Studies. Dr. Figueroa-Vásquez’s and Dr. Kernan’s transnational and Afrodiasporic scholarship transforms our understanding of Blackness at regional, national, and international scales. Their reframing of Afrolatinx and Black USAmerican literature and culture shines new light on the international and Afrodiasporic dimensions of poets like the U.S. Midwest’s Langston Hughes while envisioning new modes of Afrodiasporic community through digital and archival innovation.

Check out the Sites of Translation in the Multilingual Midwest website for more details about this event.

Register for the panel: https://umich.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_4e4ivczuQE-mB5VOEw-wnw

Absinthe: World Literature in Translation is proud to announce the upcoming release of its 28th issue, Orphaned of Light: Translating Arab and Arabophone Migration (Fall 2022).

Edited by Graham Liddell, the issue is a collection of contemporary literary works that foreground experiences of migration and refugeehood, most of them originally published after the turn of the millennium. It opens with a piece by the late Palestinian revolutionary writer Ghassan Kanafani, and also features work from other renowned authors, including Saadi Youssef, Haji Jabir, and Jan Dost. 

Additionally, Absinthe 28 highlights new work by Arabophone authors from the US Midwest, such as Gulala Nouri, a Kurdish Iraqi poet based in Dearborn, Michigan. The phrase “orphaned of light” comes from her elegiac poem “No Flowers on My Doorstep,” translated by Dearbornite Ali Harb.

This issue of Absinthe also features poetry in a bilingual format, such as the work of Sara Abou Rashed, a Palestinian American poet and MFA student at the University of Michigan, who translated her own work from English to Arabic for the issue.Veteran translators like Marilyn Booth, Nancy Roberts, and Khaled Mattawa contributed to Absinthe 28 alongside relative newcomers to literary translation, including several Michigan graduate students.

The complex creative process of translation is brought to the fore in the issue through the translators’ introductions that precede each entry. In these short reflections, translators meditate on the works’ themes, their own methodology, and the significance of the act of translation itself, particularly in the context of migration.

Orphaned of Light serves as a reminder that translation and migration are inextricably linked. Its works illustrate many forms of migration — diasporic life, undocumented labor, refugeehood, human trafficking, internal displacement, and exile — often written from the perspective of migrants themselves.

Absinthe 28 is 190 pages and is now available for preorder on Amazon. The issue is co-sponsored by the U-M Department of Middle East Studies and will be officially released at the University of Michigan on December 9, 2022 at an event featuring readings by contributors.

Every year, Contexts for Classics invites graduate and undergraduate students in all departments and programs across the University of Michigan to take part in its Classical Translations Contest. This contest is intended to highlight the work of students who are interested in the process of translation as a creative, intellectually meaningful enterprise. In recent years, the contest has expanded beyond translations of ancient Greek, modern Greek, and Latin, to include languages taught in the departments of Middle East Studies and Asian Languages and Cultures.

This year, five prizes were awarded by the Department of Classical Studies and the Modern Greek program, and one by the Department of Middle East Studies. Congratulations to this year’s winners!

Classical Studies/Modern Greek

• Ciara Barrick, ‘In Karpasia, 15th August 2009’ by Niki Marangou
• Will McClelland, Homer, Iliad 23.15–82
• Yule Eve Osband, Horace, Odes 4.12
• Melina Varlamos, ‘Refugees tell their stories. Will you listen to them?’ by Kostis Christodoulou
• Hussein Alkadhim, Euripides, Medea

Middle East Studies

• Sundus Al Ameen, ‘He is unfaithful in what he promised’, by al-Walīd ibn `Ubayd Allāh al-Buhturī

Learn about the translators and read their translations on the Contexts for Classics website.

Neha Chava was awarded the 2022 Senior Prize in Literary Translation for her translation from French of an excerpt from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint- Exupéry. Neha graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Biology, Health, & Society and in Comparative Literature.

The Department of Comparative Literature is pleased to invite graduating seniors in all departments at the University of Michigan to submit entries for our annual prize in literary translation. This prize is intended to encourage undergraduate students to develop projects in translating into English a literary text originally written in another language. 
 
Submissions are due by April 14 and will be judged by a team of faculty members in Comparative Literature. 
 
A prize of $500 will be awarded at the end of the winter term. The winner will be invited to read at the department’s graduation and awards ceremony on April 29th.
 
RULES FOR SUBMISSION

1. All seniors graduating in Summer 2021, Fall 2021, or Winter 2022, and affiliated with any department at the University of Michigan, are eligible to submit a translation.  

2. Students may choose to translate into English any literary text (or excerpt of a literary text) that was originally written in another language and in any literary genre (e.g. fiction, poetry, drama, creative nonfiction).  

3. A submission should consist of your translation (no more than 10 pages), and a brief translator’s preface (no more than 5 pages) that introduces the text and author you have chosen and explains your method of translation.  If you have worked significantly with previously available translations, glosses, or commentaries, please note these in your translator’s preface. Make sure your submission references all texts and tools you have used to produce your translation (i.e. other translations you have consulted, translation software you may have used, etc).

4. Please submit your translation in the following format: an email listing your name, your graduation date, your major(s) and minor(s), and the complete title and author of the text you have translated, and an email attachment without your namethat includes your translator’s prefaceand your translation, along with a copy of the text you have translated in its original language.

5. Your submission should be emailed to complit.student.services@umich.edu no later than 11:59 PM on Thursday, April 14, 2022.  

Questions? Contact complit.student.services@umich.edu

Join us on Friday March 18 for the sixth seminar in the Mellon Sawyer Seminar series “Sites of Translation in the Multilingual Midwest”

Visiting speakers: Clare Cavanagh (Northwestern), Yakov Klots (Hunter College), Joanna Trzeciak (Kent State) and Russell Scott Valentino (Indiana)

Local speakers: Herb Eagle (UM Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures), Jindřich Toman (UM Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures), Piotr Westwalewicz (UM Lecturer in Slavic Languages and Literatures)

Since the early 1960s and continuing to this day, if an American is reading a book by a contemporary Central European writer, chances are extremely good that the book was translated and/or published at one of a small handful of universities in the Upper Midwest. Michigan, Indiana, Iowa, and Northwestern, among a few others, have long served conspicuously as conduits for writers living in a kind of historical—and, for much of the twentieth century, political—frontier. It is through these institutions that many such writers have entered the world literary marketplace. Though rarely remarked, this concentration of activity has deep demographic, cultural, and geopolitical roots, tying the middle of one continent to the middle of another and providing a durable link between immigrant communities and their points of origination.

This interdisciplinary seminar retraces the institutional history of midwestern translation networks for Eastern European literature. The day’s activities, which are intended both for our scholarly community and the general public, will include a panel on Ann Arbor’s conspicuous role as a hub of Eastern European literature; an online and in-person exhibit of archival and print materials; an expert panel on tamizdat (banned literature published abroad and often smuggled back into its country of origin); an expert panel on the present and future of globalizing Eastern European and Central Asian literature; and a celebratory reading of poetry in translation.

Date and time: March 18, 2022, 10-4:15 ET

Location: 1010 Weiser Hall, 500 Church St.

Program:
10-10:45: “Samizdat from a Basement in Ann Arbor”: Piotr Westwalewicz, Herbert Eagle, Jindrich Toman

11-11:45: Presentation of Building Bridges Over Walls Exhibit (graduate students)

12-1: Tamizdat and the Cold War: Yakov Klots (Hunter College, The Tamizdat Project) and Jessie Labov (Central European University)

2-3: Translation Networks Today: Russell Scott Valentino (Indiana University, Slavica Publishers) and Joanna Trzeciak (Kent State University)

3:15-4:15: “Listening against Silence”: A Reading of Literature in Translation with Clare Cavanagh (Northwestern University)

In person for U-M students, faculty, and staff. Registration for in-person attendance is required. Please RSVP here by March 15: https://forms.gle/8hJFgWfxBFo1oQWA8

To attend via Zoom, register at: https://myumi.ch/9P43d

Join us via Zoom on Friday, February 18th for Building Translation Networks in the Midwest with HathiTrust, the fifth Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Sites of Translation in the Multilingual Midwest.

Key representatives from HathiTrust, Google Books and UM Library will offer behind-the-scenes looks at what led to the development of the HathiTrust Digital Library, with a particular focus on HathiTrust materials in languages taught at the University of Michigan. Researchers and instructors will offer lightning talks on examples in less commonly taught languages to reflect on the challenges of working with source texts and translations in non-roman writing systems, which are difficult to catalogue and especially to render searchable using OCR (optical character recognition).

The day will end looking forward to another event in the Fall, where instructors, students and other users will be invited to take part in an online game aimed at making these materials more accessible to a broader range of users, and to encourage exploration of HathiTrust as another site of translation.

Register here