Pablo Medina: What are We Reading, the Poem or the Translation? (January 2019)

We live in a translated culture; many of the works we consider part of the Western canon have been translated from languages most of us do not have access to. Looking at Carson’s Sappho, Lowell’s Imitations, and Weinberger’s translation of Vicente Huidobro’s Altazor. this lecture explores how we read translations and how we assign to them the same literary value as their originals.