B y Michael S a m u els 0 9 F
Between Languages A New Role for Translation
The Russian poet Polina Barskova, assistant professor of Russian literature, says she consults almost nightly with the Amherst College professor who translates her poems into English. | It was discovering a set of Yiddish translations of Native American chants that led to Associate Professor of American Literature and Jewish Studies Rachel Rubinstein’s book, Members of the Tribe: Native America in the Jewish Imagination. | “It so happened that my first ‘publications’ were actually translations of various essays,” says Norm Holland, associate professor of Hispano literatures. | Baba Hillman, Five College associate professor of film and video, who makes most of her films in France, writes her scripts in French then subtitles them in English.
T ranslation plays major and diverse roles in the work of numerous other Hampshire professors. Following an Andrew W. Mellon grant in 2009 to transform Hampshire into a “language learning community,” the College began integrating world languages into all areas of study. The goal is to prepare students for a more interconnected world, where the ability to move across languages is becoming vital. In the humanities, these professors have brought their interest in translation into the classroom, where it is a platform both for language learning and for tackling the artistic, political, and philosophical problems that arise between languages. The opportunity, says Barskova, is “to open translation to different directions of inquiry. It is a specifically Hampshirean thing,” she explains: “You appropriate
the question. You turn it toward what interests you.” When Hampshire received the grant, Barskova applied for funding to develop a course, Poetry and Translation, which would examine issues in the process of translating poetry, from the perhaps inevitable choice between sound and meaning to the politics of taking a poem out of its original language. Meanwhile, students spent the semester working on their own poetry translations. “It was one of the most alive classes that I taught here,” Barskova says. She attributes the class’s energy to the self-directed approach to language that translation allows. Although Barskova originally planned to admit only students with proficiency in a second language, she eventually dropped this requirement. Serendipitously, her monolingual students
demonstrated what Barskova considers an exciting alternative to traditional language learning. “There is this way to study language: German I, German II, German III, German IV; nice, structured, ordered, civilized,” she says. “And there is this wild idea: ‘I will begin from level zero and move toward my purpose, which is to be able to translate this poem that in translation amazed me, changed my life.’ And then this translation of one poem emerges, and the person feels much stronger and goes on with this feeling of being empowered. This is a funny way but I think it makes a lot of sense.” Rubinstein has also noted the empowering role of translation in language learning. In her Yiddish Literature and Culture class, also developed through the Mellon grant, and in an Elementary Summer 2012 To Know Is Not Enough
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