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Announcing the 7th Annual
CLASSICAL TRANSLATION CONTEST
Sponsored by CONTEXTS FOR CLASSICS at the University of Michigan!
Students from all departments are invited to submit translations of texts from Latin, Ancient Greek, and Modern Greek. We know that there are many people inspired by the beauty of these languages who wish to render them more freely and creatively than classwork often involves. This contest is intended to highlight the work of students who are interested in the process of translation as a creative, intellectually meaningful enterprise. We welcome students in Classics and other languages and literatures as well as creative writers and students interested in translating Greek and Latin into other media, such as music, the visual arts, screen arts, theater, dance, etc. Faculty in all departments are encouraged to announce this contest to their classes. We invite graduate students to inform their own undergraduate language and writing classes about this contest, and to enter it themselves.There will be two categories of contestants: undergraduate students and graduate students. Prizes will be given in each category for the first, second, and third place winning entries of original translations from the languages of Greek or Latin of any era. Winning authors will have the opportunity to present their translations and receive their prizes at the annual Classics awards ceremony on Tuesday, April 15, 2008.
RULES and PRIZES:
1. Please submit your work anonymously in the following format: include your translation without your name; a copy of the original text; and a cover page with your name, the title and author of the original text, your contact information (email, phone number, address, and department), and whether your entry is for the undergraduate or graduate level.
2. Submissions are due by noon on TUESDAY, MARCH 25, 2008, to Allison Friendly in the Classical Studies Main Office, 2160 Angell Hall (2nd floor).
3. All submissions will be judged anonymously by a panel of faculty from Classics, Comparative Literature, and English.
4. Students affiliated with any department are eligible.
5. All work should consist of original translations/interpretations of works from Ancient Greek, Modern Greek, or Latin.
6. Original works may be in prose or verse and translations may be in prose, verse, or other format, such as multi-media.
7. Maximum length of written submissions is five double-spaced pages.
8. In each category (undergraduate and graduate), the prizes will be gift certificates to a local bookstore of: $150 for each first place winner; $100 for each second place winner; and $50 for each third place winner.
9. Winners will also have the opportunity to read or present their translations at the Classics awards ceremony on TUESDAY, APRIL 15, 2008
May 7-11, 2008 at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor: "Feminism & Classics V: 'Bringing It All Back Home'." The fifth Feminism & Classics conference, will be held this spring on the campus of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. This conference series explores the interconnections between research on the ancient Mediterranean world and the study of women and gender, and has become a crucial venue for establishing feminist scholarly and pedagogical objectives and setting professional agendas in the fields of classical and feminist studies. Each of the four previous conferences in the series has attracted nationwide interest. Click here to view a PDF draft of the program of events. Click here for full registration information. Click here for a downloadable registration form. Contexts for Classics is proud to serve as a co-sponsor for this prestigious conference.
March 3, 2008, 4 pm, 2175 Angell Hall, Classics Library: "Julian's Apostasy and its Reception in Modern Literature" - a public lecture by Prof. George Syrimis, Associate Program Chair in Hellenic Studies and Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Yale University; co-sponsored by CFC's "Radical Hellenisms" Series. Despite his brief reign of less than two years, emperor Flavius Claudius Julianus (331-363) or Julian the Apostate, as he has come to be known, has never ceased to inspire both scholarship and literature. The lecture examines some of the major literary re-workings of his story and analyses modernity's enduring and self-reflexive fascination with his ambitious yet ultimately doomed project of pagan revival. Focusing mainly on the works of Ibsen, Merezhkovski, Cavafy, Kazantzakis and Gore Vidal, it addresses their questioning of the uneasy relationship between religion and secularism, their insistence on providing psychological (rather than intellectual or spiritual) justifications for his motives, and their discomfort with the contradiction between his aesthetics and sexuality.
January 9, 2008, 4-6 pm, Thayer Building, Room 2002: "Hearing Antiquity: Mendelssohn’s Music to Sophocles and the German Revival of Greek Tragedy," a public lecture by UM musicologist Jason Geary with Jonah Johnson, PhD Candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature, as CFC respondent. The 1841 production of Sophocles’s Antigone at the Prussian court, with music by Felix Mendelssohn and staging by Ludwig Tieck, represented a pivotal moment in the history of the German stage and in the larger European revival of Greek tragedy. One question, however, remains unanswered: what role did music play in the success of this performance? Construing the composer’s task as similar to that of a translator, several contemporaries identified the music as being crucial to a positive reception of the play. Their remarks highlight the degree to which Mendelssohn’s music served as a mediating force between past and present, reconciling nineteenth-century audiences to what was often perceived as an alienating form of dramatic representation. In both Antigone and the 1845 Oedipus at Colonus, Mendelssohn employed a musical language that not only reflected the ongoing dramatic action while evoking aspects of classical tragedy, but that also resonated with the many political and cultural issues bound up with the German revival of Greek drama.
Jason Geary earned his Ph.D. from Yale University with a dissertation on Mendelssohn’s incidental music to Sophoclean tragedy. He has published several articles and book chapters on this topic and also presented his work at conferences in the United States, Europe, and Australia. In 2002, he received a Fulbright grant to carry out research in Berlin and is presently at work on a book entitled German Romantic Music and the Ancient Greek Legacy. He has served as an Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Michigan since 2004.
December 7, 2007, 2-4 pm, 3222 Angell Hall: "The Rape of Euterpe: Music, Philology, and Misology in the Work of Nietzsche," a public lecture by Prof. John Hamilton, Professor of Comparative Literature and German at New York University. The pronounced distrust of verbal language throughout Nietzsche’s work, what Socrates scorned as “misology” in Plato’s Phaedo, correlates to a life-long devotion to music. A fundamental conception of music as the art of time—and hence of modification, alteration, and therefore instability or uncertainty—motivates Nietzsche’s singular contribution to philological method and subsequently his destructive zeal against all species of stabilized metaphysical images. What, however, would a “musical philology” precisely entail, and what are some of its ramifications? In what ways can musical sensibility and scholarly inquiry interact? To what extent is a “love of words” grounded in a deep mistrust of communication? Is it not the case that every philologist is, at least potentially, a misologist, an iconoclast, a music-making Socrates—a philosopher with a “third ear”?
John Hamilton taught Comparative Literature and German at Harvard University from 2001-2007, with visiting professorships in Classics at the University of California-Santa Cruz and at Bristol University's Institute of Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition. In 2005-06 he was a resident fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Since 1995, he has been involved with the Leibniz-Kreis, a working group originally based in Heidelberg, which is devoted to the "Afterlife of Antiquity." His books include Soliciting Darkness: Pindar, Obscurity and the Classical Tradition (Harvard University Press, 2003) and Music, Madness and the Unworking of Language (forthcoming: Columbia University Press, 2007). He is currently co-editing a volume of essays entitled Radical Philology, which will be published by Oxford University Press. Upcoming projects include a book-length study entitled The Fulgurant Eye: On the Concept of Security and the Moment. He has published numerous articles on Pindar, Sophocles, Lessing, Hölderlin, Heine, Kafka, Ernst Bloch, Benjamin, Heinrich Böll, Valéry, Proust, and Pascal Quignard.
November 27, 2007, 4-5 pm, Rackham Graduate School Amphitheatre: "Reconstructing Roman Architecture: Subversion, Conversion, or Diversion," a public lecture by Prof. Diane Favro, Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA. Prof. Favro is also former President of the Society of Architectural Historians. She received her PhD in Architecture from UC Berkeley working on Roman architecture and urbanism. Professor Favro's research explores the perception and interpretation of urban spaces in antiquity, as well as the pedagogy of architectural history. Her monography The Urban Image of Augustan Rome (Cambridge UP, 1996) explores the design implications of urban development under the first emperor. She has also published on women architects in early California. She is Director of the UCLA Experiential Technologies Center (see www.cvrlab.org and www.etc.ucla.edu), which promotes experiential research using a variety of technologies including the real-time modeling of historical environments complete with lighting, sounds, and linked metadata.
November 14, 2007, 4-6pm, 2015 Tisch Hall, (Comparative Literature Library): Contexts for Classics Translation Workshop: "On Translating Poetry: Something That I Have Often Done But Never Thought On," with Prof. Diskin Clay, Professor of Classical Studies at Duke University. Please join us for a public lecture and discussion by Prof. Diskin Clay on the topic of translating poetry. Prof. Clay will discuss questions and issues he has addressed in his own translations of Ancient and Modern Greek, most notably the works of the Modern Greek poet George Seferis. He will also discuss the translation of French and Italian poetry, including Apollinaire and Dante.
Diskin Clay is the R.J.R. Nabisco Professor of Classical Studies at Duke University and Onassis Senior Visiting Scholar. He received his PhD and MA from the University of Washington in Seattle and his BA from Reed College. His work covers a wide range of topics and authors including Lucretius, Epicurianism Greek tragedy, ancient utopias, Philodemus, Diogenes of Oenoanda, and George Sefaris. Prof. Clay has also traveled widely and worked on archaeological projects throughout the Mediterranean, including on Thasos, Paros, and Cyprus.
October 29, 2007, 11:30 am-1:00 pm, 3222 Angell Hall: "Classics in 20th-Century Spain: Social, Political, and Mass-Media Aspects," a brownbag discussion with University of Michigan Visiting Scholar Prof. Jorge Bergua, Universidad de Málaga, Spain. Prof. Bergua's talk will focus on several aspects of the development of classical studies in 20th-century Spain: from political issues relating to Franco's regime and the formation of classical scholarship in Spanish universities during the 40's and 50's, to more recent issues concerning the new media and its impact on the broad social reception of the classical world: publishing houses, popular music, comics, the internet, etc.
Jorge Bergua, of the Universidad de Málaga in Spain, is a visiting scholar at the University of Michigan for the fall semester of 2007. His work has focused on the classical tradition in Spain, especially during the Renaissance. He has published translations of Plutarch, Lucian, and Sextus Empiricus. His most recent book, Francisco de Enzinas: un humanista reformado en la Europa de Carlos V, was published in 2006.
April 18, 2007, 12-1:30 pm, 3222 Angell Hall, Contexts for Classics Translation Workshop: “Translating the Classics,” with Prof. Stanley Lombardo, Professor of Classics at the University of Kansas. Please join us on April 18 for “Translating the Classics,” one of this year’s Contexts for Classics Classical Translation Workshop, a panel discussion with translator and Professor of Classics Stanley Lombardo. The open discussion will be led by panelists Yopie Prins (Professor, Program in Comparative Literature), Ruth Scodel (Professor, Department of Classical Studies), Evelyn Adkins (Graduate Student, Department of Classical Studies), and Matthew Pfaff (Graduate Student, Program in Comparative Literature), all from the University of Michigan. This event is free and open to the public.
Stanley Lombardo is a Professor of Classics at the University of Kansas, where he has taught Greek, Latin, classical mythology, and Greek literature and culture since 1976. He served as department chair for fifteen years and is currently the Director of the University Honors Program. He was recently awarded a Kemper Teaching Fellowship by the university and a Mortar Board Teaching Award. He has a B.A. from Loyola University in New Orleans, an M.A. from Tulane University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Texas (1976). His publications are primarily literary translations, including the Iliad (Hackett, 1997; recipient of the Byron Caldwell Book Award)), Odyssey (Hackett, 2000; a New York Times Book of the Year), and Aeneid (Hackett, 2005), as well as translations of Plato, Hesiod, Callimachus, Aratus, Horace, Sappho, and Tao Te Ching (with Stephen Addiss; Hackett, 1993). His translations, which he designs with an eye to oral performance, are known for their contemporary, vernacular style. He has given dramatic readings from his translations of the Iliad and Odyssey on campuses across the US, at the Smithsonian Institute and the Chicago Poetry Center, and on National Public Radio and C-SPAN. He has also recorded audiobooks of his Homeric translations.
Saturday, March 3, 2007 at the University of Bristol in Bristol, England: "Reception and the Political (II)." A colloquium featuring members of Contexts for Classics from the University of Michigan and respondents from the Bristol Institute of Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition. This meeting is part of an ongoing collaboration between the two groups, the aim of which is to explore the relationships between classical antiquity and modernity and to interrogate the construction of the classical ideal. We will address subjects ranging from Aeschylus, Sophocles and Martial to Auerbach and Arendt and the problems of conceptualizing the past. For a full list of titles, participants, and information on times and location, we invite you to visit the conference website at:
http://www.bris.ac.uk/arts/birtha/centres/institute/michigan_colloquium.htm.
We warmly welcome anyone interested in attending the colloquium, both classicists and those from other fields who have an interest in political aspects of the reception of classics. Questions may be addressed to Miriam Leonard at Miriam.Leonard@bris.ac.uk.
Thursday, February 1, 2007 from 4:00-6:00 pm in the Hussey Room at the Michigan League: "Radical Hellenisms: A Roundtable Discussion on the Role of Ancient Greece in the Formation of Modern Radical Thought." This roundtable of U-M scholars engaged in the evaluation of the Hellenic ideal in modern culture and thought inaugurates an ongoing series of events under the banner of CFC. Participants include: Catherine Brown, Department of Romance Languages & Literatures and Program in Comparative Literature; Elaine Gazda & Alexander Potts, Department of the History of Art; Helmut Puff, Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures; James Boyd White, School of Law; and Steven Whiting, Department of Musicology. Click here to read the proposal for the Radical Hellenisms series.
