“When seeking knowledge of a work of art or an art form, it never proves useful to take the receiver into account”: thus begins Walter Benjamin’s foundational essay on the study of translation. This seminar proceeds against Benjamin’s injunction, paring translation studies with recent inquiries into reading practice and readerly attention to ask how modernist writers use translation to modulate readerly difficulty. How do modernist translators adjust difficulty both to safeguard and to enhance the reader’s imagination of an original text from which they are withheld? Do moments of difficulty in translated modernist texts – whether Victorian archaisms in C.K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation of Proust, or disjointed syntax in recent English editions of Aimé Césaire’s poetry – masquerade as compensation for the lost splendor of the language of the original? Zeroing in on translation, this seminar seeks papers that heed not only the translator’s approach, but also the reader’s reaction to what George Steiner calls “that which needs to be looked up.”

To consider the consequences of these encounters with translated difficulty, this seminar turns to reading scholarship. Does the mental event that occurs when confronted with what Lawrence Venuti calls “textual features that frustrate” acquire nuance when conceptualized through reading “styles”? How can we use Katherine N. Hayles’s distinction between “hyper attention” and “deep attention” to think through the reader’s hermeneutic relationship to the original modernist text? Do recent retheorizations of “close reading” help articulate this exchange of difficulty between the reader, the translation, and the imaginary original? Potential papers that involve such theorists and critics as Lawrence Venuti, Rita Felski, George Steiner, John Guillory, Katherine N. Hayles, Franco Moretti, and Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus are especially welcome, as well as papers that focus on global modernist texts, texts written in colonies, or translations involving non-European languages. 

While papers should be primarily modernist in scope, papers that look backward from the early twentieth century to earlier traditions of translation are encouraged, spanning modernism and fin de siècle French poets, modernists and early modern classicism, modernism and medievalism, as well as modernism and antiquity. Papers are likewise encouraged from those with backgrounds in other disciplines, especially psychology, classics, and medieval studies. 

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