Professor of English Steven Yao will chair a panel discussion on “Translating Victor Segalen’s Stèles” on Thursday, April 12, at 4:10 p.m. in the Kennedy Auditorium. First published in 1912, Stèles is an original collection of prose poems – or stèle-poems – in French and Chinese. Segalen’s title comes from the inscribed stone monuments, scattered around China in temple courtyards, tombs, and along roads.
The panel will include Timothy Billings, professor of English and American literatures at Middlebury College; Christopher Bush, associate professor of French and director of comparative literary studies at Northwestern University; and Haun Saussy, University Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. The event is free and open to the public.
Timothy Billings held teaching positions at Cornell and Colgate University before joining Middlebury in 1998. His translation of Stèles was honored with an Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for an Outstanding Translation of a Literary Work (2008) and a Publication Subsidy Award from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation.
Christopher Bush researches and teaches about comparative and disciplinary approaches to inter-textual relations among Euro-American and East Asian works. He has published widely in critical journals and his first book, Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media, examines the interplay between modernist conceptions of China, technological media, and writing. His collaborative translation of Stèles received the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for an Outstanding Translation of a Literary Work (2007).
Haun Saussy has taught at UCLA, Stanford, Yale, the City University of Hong Kong, and the Université de Paris-III, and served as president of the American Comparative Literature Association from 2009-2011. He has published in numerous journals, and has authored, edited, and co-edited many books on comparative literature and cultural discourse in China.
The panel discussion is part of the Spring 2012 Humanities Forum on Translation and Cultural Exchange. It is co-sponsored by the Dean of Faculty, the Yordan Lecture Fund, and the Tolles Lecture Fund.
