Assistant Professor of English Steven Yao spoke at Harvard University on "'Dent those Reprobates, Romulus and Remus': Lowell, Zukofsky and Legacies of Modernist Literary Translation." His talk on April 18 was part of the Modernism Seminar Series sponsored by Harvard's English department.
The quotation from the title is taken from Louis Zukofsky's remarkably strange translation of the odes of Catullus, in which he "translates" the Latin poets work according to the principle of sound identity, rather than the more conventional approach which focuses on semantic equivalence. Zukofsky's translation has been variously praised and condemned, but no one has adequately discussed the historical foundations of Zukofsky's radical method as a translator. This talk discusses the work of two major post-World War II American poets, Robert Lowell and Louis Zukofsky, both of whom engaged extensively in translation, but in completely distinct ways. Based on Yao's recently-published book Translation and the Languages of Modernism: Gender, Politics, Language (Palgrave, 2002), this talk examines how changes wrought during the Modernist in the practice and theory of translation as a mode of literary production not only influenced writers in the post World war II era, but continues to affect translators even today.
Yao earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley and he taught at Ohio State University from 1997 to 2002. He is the author of Translation and the Languages of Modernism (Palgrave/St. Martins, 2002). His academic interests include literary translation, poetry, Asian-American literature and cross-cultural poetics.
