A Translation Seminar with Geoffrey Brock

Th is talk will offer a brief introduction to the gray zone between translation and original composition, a zone that many writers, from Dryden to Lowell, have called imitation. We’ll look first at one of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s fruitful “translations” of Petrarch, which brought the sonnet into English, and then we’ll jump to more modern examples, including Yeats’ “When You are Old,” Donald Justice’s “Variations on a Text by Vallejo,” and others. We will consider what imitation has in common with translation, including the ways in which it can enrich the poetic culture of the source language, and how it necessarily diff ers. We may also touch on what might be called “the anxiety of imitation” and its relation to modern notions of originality.

Geoffrey Brock is the author of two collections of poetry, Weighing Light and Voices Bright Flags, the editor of Th e FSG Book of 20th-Century Italian Poetry, and the translator of half a dozen volumes of Italian poetry and prose by writers including Umberto Eco, Cesare Pavese, and Italo Calvino. He has received fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. He teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing and Translation at the University of Arkansas, where he edits a new literary journal, Th e Arkansas International.

Professor Brock’s talk is open to the IU Community and the general public.

Light refreshments will be served.