Postgraduate Course in Literary Translation

The general idea of the workshop is to present a small sample of the wide variety of works that the publishing industry tends to offer literary translators with the purpose of exposing the students to the actual work of book translation. We will work with an array of fiction and essay texts from contemporary authors written between 1955 and today. This includes writers from the United States, Canada, Great Britain as well as indigenous writers, in order to learn how to search for information and set the texts in the relevant historical and geographical context with the aim of selecting the register that we will apply.
The ultimate goal is that the students are able to meet the two basic demands of the publishing sector: meeting deadlines with a minimum degree of quality and the versatility that is indispensable for going from the short story to the travel book, from the historical novel to children's literature, from the bestselling thriller to the general interest book or quality novel. In each session, we will focus on achieving a product that fulfils the minimum requirements so that
a translation may be published. 

The objective of this workshop is to introduce the student to the translation of classical authors that, given their difficulty, are hard to approach at this stage in their training without the help of an expert. The aim is to enable the student, when translating, to consider all linguistic and cultural aspects necessary for the comprehension and rewriting of classical texts. Throughout the sessions, we will address models of different literary genres from various eras and variants of English. These will at times be full texts (a chapter or short story) and other shorter texts that exemplify concrete aspects we want to treat. 

This is a practical workshop on the publishing process that focuses on the editing of style in works translated to Spanish (aspects of orthography, grammar, syntax, style and internal coherence of a story). The editing of the typographical syntax will also be covered (publishing standards for the proper submission of the printed page). 

Reading and writing are complementary actions, and both are equally important. Without a good reader, there can be neither a good writer nor a good translator. However, as Gil de Biedma said, reading is normal, the translator is a professional that doubles as a writer. To him, possessing the
necessary tools for approaching reading not naively as a general reader or as a gratifying activity, but rather in a professional and conspicuous manner, is indispensable to translate well. However, without understanding the mechanisms at work in writing, without using the rhetoric of its literary genres, the translator will not reach a productive level in his work. This workshop will
treat reading and writing as two mechanisms that interact in a complex reality. 

A good literary text is a clockwork, the mechanism of which the translator must understand in-depth if they wish to render a good translation. In this workshop, we will try to analyse literary texts by highlighting the different mechanisms the author uses in order to create meaning. We will then move on to translation. We will place special emphasis on different kinds of resources that are important in translation: lexical resources, deixis, shifts in point of view, anaphora, and other points to which a translator must pay special attention in order to serve meaning and style.
We will work with texts from the XVIII to the XX centuries: Benjamin Constant, Faubert, Stendhal, Proust, Colette, Delerm, et. al. 
 

2 exclusive possibilities, taught on the same days:

• T2a: Italian-Spanish translation

The Italian into Spanish translation workshop focuses on two objectives: first, with a basis in the sharing of texts in class that you will have worked on previously at home, we will treat the main problems of translation between two very similar languages and will work on versatility while translating diverse texts. Second, we will learn how to use the principle dictionaries (monolingual and bilingual) with a critical approach in order to learn to assess which are truly useful for practising the profession.

• T2b: German-Spanish translation

The German into Spanish translation workshop aims to use practical exercises to recognise certain characteristics and resolve certain problems related to the literary translation of German. We will examine lexical and syntactic matters, identify various registers and observe the
texts’ anchoring in tradition. We will work with prose as well as poetry and seek to establish certain valid guidelines for translation in general. 

The Ghost Story and Gothic Literature
In this workshop, we will introduce and translate a series of fantasy short stories into Catalan. We will follow the process that the translator ideally carries out: Project outline, research, work method, timetable, parallel texts, language model, cultural references, functional equivalence or search for analogous effects, literalism or literality, editing phase and the final result.

Catalan into Spanish and Spanish into Catalan Translation
This is a chiefly practical workshop in that we will translate various literary texts (CA-ES-CA). The selection of texts is determined by the main translation problems each one presents and the translation strategies that can be used to solve them.

Reading Workshop: The American Renaissance
In this workshop, students will be introduced to the origins of the American literary tradition from its earliest sources, following some of its foundational themes and expressions through to contemporary literature. The workshop is arranged to equip translators with the hermeneutic tools for truly comprehending essential American themes, their historical context and iterations over time. We will begin with introductory texts by Ralph Waldo Emerson and other Transcendentalist writers like Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller. We will explore the Gothic tradition from Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe through H.P. Lovecraft, Charlotte Perkins, Shirley Jackson and even Stephen King. We will listen to the cadences of the King James Version of the Bible and find how it lurks behind so much of
American writing, spotting it in paragraphs of Hermann Melville’s Moby Dick, its myths and parables in Faulkner and Philip K. Dick, Nabokov and Philip Roth. We will read poems by Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop. And discuss some of these recurring American leitmotifs in films like The Dead Poet’s Society and The Human Stain.

Reverse translation is a sometimes entertaining, often maddening exercise that enhances one's awareness of one's own source language, as well as of the foreign target language. Practice in this area also prepares one for the many occasions in one's career when there is a request for a translation into English. We will be working on texts ranging in literary value from quality
journalism, fictional and nonfictional prose, to poetry. Prose will occupy an important place. Interestingly enough, however, the work on poetry ("News that STAYS News") often generates the most enthusiasm, as soon as it is understood that such an exercise is not primarily a matter of obsessing about rhyme and meter! Some useful theoretical essays will be offered as obligatory
reading, but the emphasis throughout will be on practical work in the lecture room. 

2 exclusive possibilities, taught on the same days:

• T6a: Translation of poetry and theatre

At first glance, poetry and theatrical texts are extreme experiences of the approximation to literary production in another language. Nevertheless, concrete and regular practice places them almost in the centre of that alchemy that is the practice of translation. Somehow,
poetic and theatrical texts condense in a reduced material space all of the elements, tropes and dilemmas presented, perhaps less intensely, by narrative or essayist prose. This workshop offers the chance to tackle these apparently more complex or elusive challenges by identifying them and working them from an essentially formal perspective with the purpose of developing technical tools that will be of use to us in all areas of translation. The strategy is simple: facing the giants will make the windmills manageable. We will work, either in groups or individually, on the basic rhetorical material of poetry and theatre: rhythm, cadence, silences, compression, internal tensions, hidden games, registers, expression, and fate, until we are familiar with them and no longer fear them, yet always respect them. 

• T6b: Translation of graphic novels and comics

Six very practical sessions on the translation of the graphic narrative, a booming sector. We will look at the medium’s features and its language and, mainly, we will spend time translating many examples of several genres and sharing the different solutions found.

From the beginning of the program until the end of it, participants will develop an individual project under the direction and guidance of a mentor teacher. The works must adhere to the following fundamental lines:

• History of translation: synchronic or diachronic studies.
• Comparative critical studies of existing translations.
• Studies of comparative literature and translation.
• Proposals for the translation of unpublished works in Catalan or Spanish, after justification of their literary, academic or commercial interest.