Conference: Translation Matters: East Asian Literatures in Transnational Perspective

March 26 & 27, 2004 (Friday & Saturday)

Conference: Translation Matters: East Asian Literatures in Transnational Perspective
Location: Buell Hall, Columbia University (116th St. and Amsterdam Ave.)
9:00 AM – 6:30 PM
With the help of writers from across East Asia, along with translators, scholars, and publishers from around the world, we will explore the integral relations between translation and the way that literature is conceived, practiced, transmitted, and studied. Not a mere by-product of literature, translation “matters”, shaping literary and cultural traditions from their beginnings. We will investigate, in particular, how translation figures crucially in the formation of modern Chinese, Japanese, and Korean literatures, as well as in the rise of the disciplines which study them. Mapping the spatial and temporal migration of literary forms, examining the practice and production of translation, tracing the expansionary forces at work within national literary languages – our various inquiries will all reassert the crucial role of translation in literary creation and in the advance of the humanities.
Co-sponsored by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Center for Chinese Cultural and Institutional History, and the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University.