Stephanie McCarter (The University of the South (Sewanee))
Literary translation builds bridges, yoking scholarship and creative writing as well as the classroom and the world at large. It is a scholarly tool crucial to the expansion, survival, and relevance of the field, while also being a literary pursuit in its own right. Literary translation can transcend the confines of the academy in a way that traditional scholarship cannot, nurturing important acts of literary and artistic reception that open Classics up in relevant ways to new spaces and communities. For example, Nina MacLaughlin, in Wake Siren: Ovid Resung, clearly draws on Alan Mandelbaum’s Metamorphoses translation and even credits it for having had a “lasting impact” on her life. This talk champions translation as part of a broader interdisciplinary engagement with the liberal arts both inside and outside of the academy.
As a field, however, Classics has traditionally drawn a sharp a line between scholarship and creative pursuits such as translation. Edith Hall (2008) has connected Classics’ general disdain for translation to its historical class biases—the view that “scholars” should engage with Greek and Latin originals rather than the translations meant for popular consumption. Such attitudes had the effect of closing off space rather than opening it up, and of stifling interdisciplinary possibilities within Classics. Despite this, Classics has long prided itself as the original interdisciplinary field, weaving together literary studies, history, archaeology, papyrology, epigraphy, digital humanities, art history, philosophy, women’s and gender studies, queer studies, studies in race and ethnicity, disability studies, and more. Literary translation is yet another pursuit ripe for incorporation into the ever-expanding idea of what an interdisciplinary Classics can be.
Working at a liberal arts college has given me a fertile space to become a translator. It is indeed unlikely that I would have turned to translation without the interdisciplinary environment of a small college dedicated to training students broadly within the fields of Humanities. Much of my teaching is in English translation, and I regularly offer interdisciplinary Humanities courses alongside colleagues from other departments such as Religious Studies, English, Art History, and Philosophy. The liberal arts college is a space not so much for specialized lectures but for wide-ranging talks by artists, writers, politicians, and thinkers. In such an environment, it has been easy to let the traditional parameters and confines of Classics blur, and this blurring is one the broader field should more readily embrace, taking up the task not only of studying the past but also of creatively participating in its modern reception