Sarah Nance (United States Air Force Academy)
sara@****.com (Log-in to reveal)

This roundtable asks participants to consider the act of poetic translation in any and all of its forms, with particular attention to issues of pedagogy and bi- and multilingual poetics. How do we think of multilingual poetics together with the act of translation—whether formally or on behalf of the reader—as part of a long, nuanced history about issues of identity, family, loss, diaspora, and culture? And how do we transmit some of those nuances to students in the classroom? This roundtable seeks to start an important pedagogical conversation about the role of language in writing itself, particularly in poetic form.

In 1850, English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning published her widely acclaimed Sonnets from the Portuguese. Browning, wishing to veil the personal details that appeared in the sonnets, introduced some (false) critical distance by suggesting the poems were translated from Portuguese when they were, in fact, written entirely by the poet herself in English. For Barrett Browning, the very intimation of translation suggested the ghostly presence of another language: a reference to Portuguese that lingers at the edges of her poem, even though no text from that language appears.

Yet for poets throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the omnipresence of a more connected world is reflected in the bi- and multilingual practices of contemporary poetics. Once considered a way for canonical Western poets to showcase their learnedness—consider T.S. Eliot, for example, and the uses of numerous languages including Greek, Italian, French, and Sanskrit in The Waste Land—multilingual poetics today are often thought (perhaps not unproblematically) to emphasize multiculturism and complex intersections of identity. In response, we invite reflections, considerations, arguments, and provocations about any aspect of the long history of poetic acts of translation, grounded in a pedagogical approach that unsettles hierarchies of meaning and value.

This roundtable asks professors, teachers, leaders, and instructors to consider how they bring bi- and multilingual poetry into their classrooms and how the process of translation—both literal and figurative—begins. With collections as wide-ranging as José Olivarez’s Citizen Illegal, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, Eduardo C. Corral’s Slow Lightning, Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas, Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic, Natalie Scenters-Zapico’s Lima :: Limón, Diana Khoi Nguyen’s Ghost Of, Tracy K. Smith’s The Body’s Question, and Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky With Exit Wounds, contemporary poets build on a long legacy of poetic translation and multilingualism. In so doing, they consider a diverse set of issues: identity, diaspora, heritage, family, loss, writing, philosophy, and replication, among others.

We welcome proposals about any aspect of teaching and poetic translation, widely imagined, such as: teaching poetic works with more than one language; student creative writing; connections between language and identity; erasure of language; visual aspects of translation, language, writing; histories of translation; poets situated at the crossroads of multiple identities, and more. This roundtable seeks to fill an important gap in the pedagogy of poetics, and offer a conversation about how we might consider, approach, and teach multilingual poetry.