Life Writing and Translations will approach translating as a linguistic, cultural, and adaptive act—and in many cases, all three at once. In addition to engaging with critical and theoretical reading focused upon textual translation, cultural, social, and political negotiations, and adaptation and parody, the course will examine lifewriting texts that foreground issues of multi-lingual lives, diasporic narratives, and life representation in various media—among them film, graphic narrative, painting, statuary, installations, and online lives. The key concern throughout will be mediation—how aspects of lives become transformed through personal, institutional, and ideological interchanges.
Though the seminar is offered through the English graduate program, and therefore will be of particular interest to English MA and PhD students, candidates dealing with issues of linguistic translation, adaptation, and cultural mediation enrolled in the Hawaiʻinuiākea School of Hawaiian Knowledge, the programs and departments of Indigenous Politics and Political Science, Ethnic Studies, American Studies, History, and the College of Education, or unclassified graduate students engaged in the larger Hawaiʻi communities will find the detailed critical and theoretical grounding, and the opportunity to design a final project directly related to their interests, beneficial to their own progress. A sizable portion of the assigned texts are drawn from work devoted to Hawaiʻi, Asia, and the Pacific.
Researchers, writers, and teachers working in the field of translation—primarily individuals whose work the class will be reading—will also be invited as guest speakers for certain seminar sessions. I will be confirming dates and times in the next few weeks.
In addition to weekly postings (@ 300 words) on the upcoming assigned reading and viewing, at least two brief class presentations on the course content, and a half-hour summary of their chosen final assignment, students will prepare a very substantial research paper / book proposal / dissertation prospectus that will go through two full revisions before submission. Mandatory student-instructor conferences will occur regularly—before all presentations, and in relation to the final assignment.
Student Learning Outcomes
For MA candidates, the Student Learning Outcomes include an introduction to or reinforcement of their critical, theoretical, and methodological knowledge regarding the Literary Studies and Cultural Studies Hawaiʻi/Asia/ Pacific concentrations. Studying translations necessarily requires the exercise of close reading skills and detailed comparative methods. The various course requirements are designed to strengthen the students’ abilities to present work orally, in written form, or through combinations of images and written and spoken words.
PhD candidates will be encouraged to expand and refine the same skills listed for the MAs. But as current or future in-service teachers and/or public intellectuals, PhD candidates will also be asked to consider in greater detail how to develop pedagogy related to the course materials that can inform their own post-secondary teaching, and their advising, consulting, or instructing outside of the university. The range of academic genres available for possible final projects will also allow students from English or any other department to customize the course deliverables to fit with their program requirements or ongoing research endeavors.
Life Writing and Translations–A Survey of the Semester
Primary Texts
Part I—Linguistic Translation
Weeks 2–4—Lawrence Venuti. The Translation Studies Reader, 4th edition, Routledge, 2021.
Extensive selections, including Foundational Statements (Dryden, Schleiermacher, Goethe, Nietzsche), and essays by Walter Benjamin, Roman Jakobson, Gayatri Spivak, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Vincente L. Rafael, and others. Selections will be also drawn from Translation, Resistance, Activism, Maria Tymoczko, ed. 2010, and S. Shankar. Flesh and Fish Blood: Postcolonialism, Translation, and the Vernacular, 2012.
Week 5—Eva Hoffman. Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language. 1990.
Part II—Cultural Translation
Week 6—Maxine Hong Kingston. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. 1976.
Week 7—Edward Said. Out of Place: A Memoir. 2000.
Week 8—Rita Huggins and Jackie Huggins. Auntie Rita. 2005.
Week 9—Daniel Heath Justice, Alice Te Punga Somerville, and Noelani Arista. “Indigenous Conversations about Biography.” Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 39:3 (2016).
Week 9—Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada and Noʻu Revilla. “We Are Mauna Kea: Aloha ʻĀina Narratives of Protest, Protection, and Place.” Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 33:3 (2020).
Part III–Adaptation
Week 10—Joe Sacco. Journalism. 2012.
Week 11—Behrouz Boochani. No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison, 2019.
Week 12—Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio. Remembering Our Intimacies. Moʻolelo, Aloha ʻĀina, and Ea, 2021
Week 13—Susan Orlean. The Orchid Thief. A True Story of Beauty and Obsession, 2000.
Week 13—Spike Jonze, dir. and Charlie Kaufman, writer. Adaptation. 2002.
Weeks 14–16 are reserved for the Student Research final presentations.
Secondary Texts
There will be a substantial amount of listed supplementary reading for each week, which will be of greater or lesser importance, depending on time, individual student areas of interest, and the directions the course takes. Among these supplementary works will be texts by Linda Hutcheon (Adaptation, 2006), Franklin and Fuchs eds. (Life Writing and Translations, 2009), Hertha Sweet Wong (Picturing Identity, 2018), Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada (Ka Mana Unuhi: An Examination of Hawaiian Translation 2018), Noelani Arista (The Kingdom and the Republic, 2019), Noenoe Silva (Power of the Steel-Tipped Pen, 2017), and M. Puakea Nogelmeier (Mai Paʻa i Ka Leo, 2002).
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Craig Howes is the Director of the Center for Biographical Research, the co-editor of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, and Professor of English at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa since 1980. The co-editor of Teaching Lifewriting Texts (MLA 2007), The Value of Hawaiʻi (2010) and The Value of Hawaiʻi 3—Hulihia, the Turning (2020), he co-produced the Biography Hawaiʻi television documentary series, and is active in Living History projects through the Hawaiʻi Pono’ī Foundation. He is also currently an MA candidate in the Kawaihuelani Hawaiian Language program, part of the Hawaiʻinuiākea College of Hawaiian Knowledge. His thesis research involves extensive archival work in nineteenth century international fictional and non-fictional texts translated into Hawaiian and published in the newspapers by settlers and Hawaiians. His essay “Translating Reynolds to the Pacific, and Widening Victorian Studies” is forthcoming in Reynolds Reimagined: Studies in Authorship, Radicalism, and Genre, 1830–1870 (Routledge, 2023).