Contents

This course runs from October to the following September. Your M Phil course consists of course work assessed by essay, of translation work, options and a dissertation on a translation-related topic. There are core elements (common to everyone) and options.

1) Core elements:

A student seminar to which students bring their own translation (normally into English) for debate and discussion. Runs throughout through Michaelmas and Hilary Term, 2 hours per week. At the end of the year, students are requested to submit a portfolio of translations. This work is undertaken in conjunction with a tutor from the language of the student's choice, and counts for 30% of the final assessment. Although there is compensation between the different component parts of the course, students must achieve a pass on the submitted portfolio component, in order to pass overall.

2)Texts and translations, a discussion seminar of translation practice. Runs throughout the year, 2 hours per week. Coordinators: Susana Bayó/Ciaran Cosgrove/guest translator. This course is not separately assessed but feeds into preparation for the portfolio and the dissertation. This course is followed in the second term by seminars with visiting translators.

3)Core Course 1 (Michaelmas Term): Comparison / Translation

This core course is shared with the MPhil in Comparative Literature, and explores some key theoretical issues raised by the activities of comparing and translating literatures. Recognition of the difference of other languages, literatures and cultures is arguably what initiates the projects of comparison and of translation. But, having acknowledged difference, what then authorises comparison, or translation? What are the conditions of comparability, or translatability? What continuities have to be presumed in order to claim that a given text is like (or unlike) another? Or that a given text is equivalent to another?

The course examines different ways in which we might conceive of the relationships and the divergences between texts, cultures and traditions, as well as between disciplines. For, while inviting the students of Literary Translation and Comparative Literature to explore their shared concerns, the course is also an invitation to consider what distinguishes translation and comparison, and therefore to engage with the still very current debates around the legitimacy of Comparative Literature as a distinct field of inquiry. Students study a range of historical and more contemporary theoretical and literary texts with a view to acquiring an understanding of Literary Translation and Comparative Literature as inherently self-reflective critical practices, where the grounds for translation and for comparison are always open to question.

Topics covered:

Week 1: Literatures and Nations

Week 2: Literatures and Languages

Week 3: 'World literature', Cosmopolitanism and Globalization

Week 4: What is (not) Literature?

Week 5: Transmutations

Week 6: The (In)Stability of Genres

Week 7: Influence, Intertextuality and Literary History

Week 8: Questions of Reception

Week 9: Reading Comparatively

4)Core Course 2 (Hilary Term):History and Theory

This course is taken only by students of Literary Translation and is made up of a series of one-hour lectures (with follow-up one-hour seminars) by different members of faculty. The lectures explore the theory and practice of translation in the context of a specific historical moment.

The aim of the course is to provide students with a sense of the diversity of approaches to thinking about translation (linguistic, socio-linguistic, philosophical, literary and so on), and the diversity of contexts in which these reflections appear, as well as a broad introduction to key moments in the history of translation theory (the Medieval and Early Modern periods, the Renaissance, Romantic Germany...).

Possible topics include (please note these are subject to change due to faculty availability):

1. Language and Meaning

2. Translation in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods

3. The Decameron in English: Versions and Issues

4. Leonardo Bruni's De interpretatione recta

5. Translation and Nation: the example of Germaine de Stael's Corinne

6. On Kleist's Herrmannsschlacht : Translation, Cultural Exchange and German Identit

7. Meaning and Translation: Some Philosophical Issues

8. Hiberno-English and Problems of Literary Translation

9. Translation and Deconstruction

5)Non-core elements:

Students select options in consultation with the Course Director. These are assessed by essay (20%). Students are required to attend either 2 one-term options or 1 two-term options.

6)A dissertation of up to 20,000 words on a translation-related topic (which may be an annoted translation), to be submitted at the end of the academic year (September following admission: 30%). In essence, the period from the end of the second (Hilary) term until the end of this course is mainly devoted to work on the dissertation.

It is at this stage students who so wish may seek to spend time in a partner institution. Students work under the guidance of a dissertation supervisor. In the case of an annotated translationthe commentary should contain a substantial theoretical component. The length of the translation and commentary should be agreed with the supervisor.