Making Space for Translation

In September 2021, Elvis Costello released Spanish Model, a new version of his iconic album This Year’s Model. The new release uses the original master tapes from the 1978 recording for all but the lead vocal tracks, which are replaced with Spanish-language

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.

In 1793, a Catalan Jesuit, José Manuel Peramás, living out his exile in the Papal States of Italy published a detailed treatise in Latin about life in the Guaraní Republic of Paraguay, where he had lived decades before. His audience was made up, primarily, of well-educated Europeans in a variety of nations for whom Paraguay was a distant and fantastical land – belonging perhaps more to the realm of the imaginary than anywhere else.

This paper serves as an author’s commentary and a creative deconstruction of my recently published project re-translating Sappho’s “Brothers Poem” into the context of Victorian English epistolary, examining both the scholarly sources that I used to craft my poem and the theoretical landscape of poetic and geographic spaces that lie beneath my literary production.

Smallness is a feature of my work as a translator in how I use the physical space of a page, how I conceive of a translation in relation to the original text, and in my choice of texts to translate.