ABSTRACT

Focusing on a canonical author is an immensely productive way to teach students how to translate by showing them how to base their translation practice on research. Teaching canonical works with attention to the history of their survival enables students to move away from fixed notions of authorship and invention. Translation becomes a hermeneutic practice worthy of study in its own right, where learning how to interpret is indistinguishable from learning how to translate into different media. Hala Halim questions the colonial blinders of Cavafy's British legacy, while Vicente Rafael helps us to conceptualize how differently Cavafy is received in America, the new empire, and how translations navigate the repressive force of American monolingualism. The analytical assignment is designed to compensate for the students' uneven linguistic background by enabling them all to consider the relations between the source texts and the translations.