Lotsawa Translation Workshop Opening Remarks
Marcus Perman2022-11-16T23:40:41-07:00Conference organizers Holly Gayley (University of Colorado, Boulder) and Dominique Townsend (Bard College) welcome participants and mentors. Holly thanks Tsadra Foundation for supporting the conference, and shares her inspiration for facilitating sustained dialogue about various genres of Tibetan literature. Dominique introduces the venerable speakers for the opening keynote.
Marcus Perman, Director of Research for Tsadra Foundation, encourages translators in their work by articulating the relevance of translated publications for the Western Tibetan Buddhist audience. Ending with a moment of silence for two bright translators who recently passed away (Chris Stagg and Gen Tsering Dhundup Gongkatsang), Marcus helps start the workshop with […]
Dynamics of Devotion
Migmar Lama2022-11-16T23:40:43-07:00Andrew Quintman (Wesleyan), Lara Braitstein (McGill), Heidi Nevin (Independent), Anne Klein (Rice), Holly Gayley (University of Colorado, Boulder), and Annabella Pitkin (Lehigh) take on the topic of devotion in translation. Annabella Pitkin skillfully facilitates discussion focused on three themes: literary and embodied devotion, translation as an act of devotion, and the cultural translation of devotion. Regarding the first, the group considers what terms are particularly difficult to unpack in English, posing questions like, “How does language serve to dictate devotion?”, and, “How does literature and its utterance help mediate the distance between subject and object?” While translators are positioned as […]
Devotion to the Guru, Loyalty to the Nation
Migmar Lama2022-11-16T23:40:45-07:00Riga Shakya, doctoral student in history at Columbia University, looks at the relationship between history and literature and the making of an inner Asian empire, specifically the early Qing expanses into the Tibetan plateau. By considering autobiographies, biographies, and key historical sources of this period, Riga explores the “language of loyalty” and the role of lay elites in articulation of the relationship between empire and subject populations. Holly Gayley (University of Colorado, Boulder) extrapolates on the theme of “language of loyalty”, drawing attention to pop music of the twenty and twenty-first centuries that illustrates embodied acts of devotion through the […]
Lotsawa Translation Workshop Closing Remarks
Migmar Lama2022-10-26T05:24:17-06:00In this short session, Dominique Townsend (Bard), Holly Gayley (University of Colorado, Boulder), Marcus Perman (Tsadra Foundation), Janet Gyatso (Harvard), Kurtis Schaeffer (UVa) and Lama Jabb (Oxford) offer their gratitude and brief reflections to responders, participants, and sponsors. Four participants of the workshop share their impressions of the weekend including having developed a deeper understanding of what is at stake in, and the challenges of, the practice of translation, and the importance of one’s disposition as an ambassador of a text’s content and context. Overall, attendees expressed appreciation of the collaborative process and how the community of translators of Tibetan […]
Translation Theories Made Practical
Marcus Perman2022-11-16T23:34:10-07:00See the text discussed and presentation slides here.
Holly Gayley and Roger Jackson begin the discussion session with some provocations and a quote:
“Had translation depended for its survival on theory, it would have died out long before Cicero. Yet its practice has always assumed principle, the professional conscience of 2,000 years being summed up in Roman Jakobson’s ‘translator of what messages? betrayer of what values?’” – L.G. Kelly, The True Interpreter.
What makes for a good translation?
What are the translations you like to read and why?
What are the kinds of translations you like to create and why?
“Up to a point, each […]
Transmission and Translation: Priorities for the Next 20 Years
Marcus Perman2022-10-30T21:53:38-06:00This session was a chance for people to share ideas about priorities and projects for the future. What texts should be translated? What are the needs of the community? What do you see happening in the next 20 years?
Translating Poetic and Inspirational Materials
Marcus Perman2022-10-30T22:45:26-06:00Poetic and inspirational materials exist as a place where culture emerges creating a challenge for the translator to capture both the meaning and the psychological effect of the literature in the target language. Andrew Quintman begins this workshop with a theoretical discussion of how the characteristics and structure of a traditional song of devotion give clues about indigenous conceptions of poetry in the Tibetan tradition. Holly Gayley works through various grammatical structures and literary conventions, like metaphor and parallelism, to illustrate the scope of possibility in conveying meaning. Finally, Wulstan Fletcher guides the group through the challenge of capturing the […]
