vol. 35, no.

05 NEWS and ideas FOR THE COLUMBIA COMMUNITY November 23, 2009

New Master’s Is Not Lost In Translation

By Nick Obourn ecutive director. Originally a partnership the literature they’ll be translating.
between the School of the Arts and PEN Since the establishment of the course

I
n 2008, after the Nobel Prize in
literature went to yet another non-
American author, the head of the
Nobel Prize jury declared that Europe
was the center of the literary world.
“The U.S. is too isolated, too insular,” said
Horace Engdahl. “They don’t translate
enough and don’t really participate in
the big dialogue of literature.”
Few heard those comments as clear-
ly as the people who run the Center
for Literary Translation at Columbia
University. The center was founded
in 2004 with a mission to support the
artful translation of world literature
and to create a larger presence for it in
this country.
Michael Scammell, a professor in the
Creative Writing Program, is its academic
director; Idra Novey, an award-winnng
poet and translator who graduated from
the Columbia M.F.A. program, is its ex-
America Center, the center now is fund-
ed solely by the school.
Starting this fall, the center expand-
ed to better incorporate translation
into the Columbia writing community
and began its first series of courses de-
signed to integrate translation into the
writing curriculum.
“Michael and I worked with the
writing division and the dean’s office to
make the center more student-focused
and create a joint course of study in
writing and translation,” says Novey. The
translation courses are taken in addition
to the current requirements for degrees
in poetry, fiction and non-fiction.
Students in translation and writing
must take two translation workshops,
two seminars or master classes on inter-
national literature and translation, and
two electives outside of the writing pro-
gram to enrich their understanding of
work, Novey has not only seen an in-
crease in interest among writing students
but also a wider diversity of languages be-
ing translated. She says that French and
Spanish are the most common, but “re-
cent students have translated from Per-
sian, Portuguese, Korean, Urdu, Hebrew,
Yiddish, German, Italian and Russian.”
As writers and translators, Scammell
and Novey know that by expanding an
understanding of other languages, writ-
ers have more tools at their disposal.
“It opens your mind to so many new
ways of putting together a sentence or
moving through a story that you might
not have considered otherwise,” says
Novey. “In 10 years, I’d like to see The
Record write an article about how
many of the most exciting up-and-
coming writers in the United States
are also accomplished translators who
studied at the center.”

Barcarola From the poem BarcarolA

Eu e (você) andando,
de mãos emprestadas, quase pelas ruas,
sem olhar pra cima nem pros lados nem pra frente,
porém em direção ao Futuro.
Ou ao Eterno. Ou ainda: ao Sublime.
(You) and I roaming,
our hands on loan to one another, almost
through the streets, without looking above or to the sides,
or even ahead, in the direction of the Future.
Or the Eternal. Or even: the Sublime.

Above is an excerpt from the book The Clean Shirt of It, by Paulo Henriques Britto.
It was translated by Idra Novey and published in the Lannan Translations Series in 2007 with BOA Editions.