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title: 'Brainstorming for Freshman Seminar: The Creative Work of Translating'
tags: [anna]

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tags: anna
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# Brainstorming for Freshman Seminar: The Creative Work of Translating

(See description of course and project below)

Workshop idea:
We start with a conversation about 'moves' and elements of different media, and how poetry can be translated across media, having them look at a model or models to frame the conversation.
We give students a text or texts, or print out some that they’ve worked with in the course, and then have them rotate around stations where they do a translation in each, into a new media or something like this?

Station ideas:
- Artistic translation using supplies in learning lab, to think about how to translate across media:
    - A few things students have made there (but there are MANY more options and ways of doing this):
    
    ![](https://i.imgur.com/OJZcpG2.jpg)
    ![](https://i.imgur.com/XLh3O2f.jpg)
    ![](https://i.imgur.com/sq45Lhh.jpg)


    


- Video: using our overhead cameras, take your poem and translate it into video in some creative way- you can do this using our physical supplies! 

     - A few videos students have made here:
        ![group two's stop-motion](https://i.imgur.com/YDWUMAQ.gif)
- Audio: Maybe we can do recordings in the small studio? Audio could be broadly defined, not just reading the poem aloud, but we could just challenge them to translate the written text into audio in some way.
- Scrollytelling in some way, something like [this](https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/91a61c352b9844ebb3a2fad9db218707)
- Or something about combining physical materials (like our scrollytelling from before) with web-based work, like this:
    - ![](https://i.imgur.com/hu4gWKS.jpg)


At the end, we can have people present a translation or translations in a kind of collection.

From Marlon:
maybe there can be a sequence of translations too (if that works, given their projects) . . . where a series of students translates the same thing into different media (then we display them to show how the thing shifts as it moves from medium to medium). 




About the course:
Translation makes culture possible. Individual writers and thinkers draw sustenance and stimulation from works created outside their own cultures, and artists working in one format get ideas from those working in entirely different media. Translation between languages and between art forms will center our seminar’s work. Taking a broad view of translation as a mental activity, we will study poems, fiction, film, photography, film, and music. We will stretch our own imaginative capacities by transposing material across media and genres, creating homophonic translations, and translating between languages. We will work individually as well as collaboratively. We will read a small amount translation theory, and some reflections by working translators. We will invite into our classroom practicing poets and translators, attend readings and lectures at Harvard, visit the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum and the Harvard Museum of Natural History.The only requirement is some knowledge of a language besides English – and a readiness to play with languages, art forms, and texts. Readings likely from Polina Barskova, Walter Benjamin, Jorge Luis Borges, Anne Carson, Emily Dickinson, Forrest Gander, Susan Howe, Yi Lei, Vladimir Nabokov, Sappho, W. G. Sebald, Wang Wei, and Sor Juana; music by John Adams and David Grubbs. Films to include Despair, Chekhovian Motifs and The Golem.

About the final project:
On April 6, 2023, you will turn in a proposal for a final project, which might include a first draft of the final project. The project can build on the assigned weekly writings, it can be your own translation (involving text, image, video, dance, music, or any combination); it can imagine an impossible translation.  If you stop by my office, I can show you samples of previous students’ work meant to inspire you to be wildly creative and open to new possibilities for thinking about what translation can mean.
 

At a final gathering, just after classes end, you will turn in your final project and present some portion of it to the seminar, and we will celebrate the end of your first year as a college student. That project may expand on or revise the earlier draft; it may be an assembled, re-shuffled or collaged portfolio of several elements. There is no fixed minimum or maximum length or size, because the content can be so varied, but imagine something like ten pages of text if you are doing something written.