The Visuality and Materiality of Alexander Pope's Original Subscriber Editions of Homer
By Richard H Armstrong (University of Houston)
While everyone knows Alexander Pope’s translations of Homer were important and influential, this paper explores the material and visual dimensions of his first subscription editions to underscore certain less well-known facts. First, Pope was very much the artist of the deal in his arrangements with his publisher, and because of the unique contract he made for an exclusive subscription edition, he became one of the first translators in Europe to get rich exclusively off the sales of a translation project (McLaverty 1993, Foxon 1991).
Homer Between Hypertext and Paratext: The Cover Art of Two Adaptations of the Iliad
By Katherine R De Boer (Xavier University)
This paper studies the intersection of hypertext and paratext in the cover art of adaptations of Homer’s Iliad: Dolan’s The War Nerd Iliad and Barker’s The Silence of the Girls. Both covers feature original artwork: by the surrealist C.M. Kösemen (Dolan), and the printmaker Sarah Young (Barker). Both artists draw on the visual styles of Greek vase painting but invest them with modern visual codes that complicate each author’s engagement with the gendered dynamics of Homer.
Reorienting Narratives: Optatian and the Unachievable Translation
By Clara Lazzoni Lazzoni (Edinburgh University)
The Constantinian poet Optatian is the first author known to have written versus intexti (“interwoven verses”), a special form of picture poems.
Translating the Mythical Female Body in the Graphic Novel: Emil Ferris' My Favorite Thing is Monsters
By Elizabeth Bobrick (Wesleyan University)
Translating the Mythical Female Body in the Graphic Novel: Emil Ferris’ My Favorite Thing Is Monsters
Helen in Trans-lation: Putting a Trans Helen on Stage
By Julia M Perroni (University of Wisconsin)
This paper examines the use of queer emphasis in my translation of Euripides’s Helen combined with visualization of performance context to bring out queer and trans themes such as embodiment and alienated identity. The first part is a reflection on the project itself—to translate Helen’s Helen as a trans woman—and its inspiration.
Martha Graham, Isamu Noguchi, and the Translation of Greek Myth into the Visual
By Ronnie Ancona (Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center)
Translation is a kind of reception or perhaps reception is a kind of translation. The boundaries between the two are porous and there are competing definitions and approaches to these “twin” activities (see, e.g., Lianeri, 2019). Jacobson’s phrase “intersemiotic translation,” cited in the CFP for this panel, foregrounds the fluidity or changeability of the medium, recognizing that translation can occur from one system of meaning or language, verbal or visual, to another.