Vocabularies of Longing
How do the translator and the reader work with emotion flowing from text? Sarah Jacoby (Northwestern) and Lara Braitstein (McGill) pose questions and present examples from Tibetan poetry in this breakout session convened on the first morning of the 2018 Lotsawa Translation Workshop. Sarah discusses how we move from literature to life if literary theory maintains that the stories are only words on a page. She explores the intersubjective encounter with what we read and how emotion can be decoded when considering the work’s literary origins and historical context, then offers some tips for translators to work with the emotional register. Lara considers emotional register from the Indic and Tibetan perspective and the translator’s job in creating a new emotional community. The group then considers the translator’s effect on the way emotion is embraced in the target language and the responsibility of reciprocity of translation work.
Event: Lotsawa Translation Workshop – Breakout Session
Date: October 6, 2018 – 9:00 am
Speakers: Lara Braitstein, Sarah Jacoby
Topics:
Sarah Jacoby
Northwestern University
Sarah Jacoby, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Religious Studies Department at Northwestern University. She is also the co-chair of the Tibetan and Himalayan Religions Group at the American Academy of Religion. Sarah Jacoby studies Tibetan Buddhist doctrine and ritual in practice, gender and sexuality, Tibetan literature, religious auto/biography, Buddhist revelation (gter ma), and the history of eastern Tibet. She is the author of Love and Liberation: Autobiographical Writings of the Tibetan Buddhist Visionary Sera Khandro (Columbia University Press, 2014), co-author of Buddhism: Introducing the Buddhist Experience (Oxford University Press, 2014), and co-editor of Buddhism Beyond the Monastery: Tantric Practices and their Performers in Tibet and the Himalayas (Brill, 2009).
Lara Braitstein
McGill University
Lara Braitstein is Associate Professor of Indian and Tibetan Buddhism at McGill University. She has also taught at the Karmapa International Buddhist Institute (K.I.B.I.) in New Delhi, and the Rangjung Yeshe Institute in Kathmandu. She teaches Mahayana & Vajrayana Buddhist Philosophy, Buddhist Hagiography, and Tibetan/Himalayan Buddhist literature and historiography. She translated the 14th Shamarpa’s The Path to Awakening, and is the author of The Adamantine Songs: Study, Translation, and Tibetan Critical Edition, a study of Saraha’s Mahamudra poems. Her recent research is a study dedicated to untangling the history and representation of the 10th Shamarpa Chodrup Gyatso.
