Lecture by Claire Solomon, Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies, Oberlin College and Alumna, Yale Department of Spanish and Portuguese.
Contemporary literary translation theory stresses the untranslatable even as Google Translate promises to render human translators obsolete. Rereading Roberto Arlt’s classic two-volume novel Los siete locos (1929) and Los lanzallamas (1931) through the prism of translation theory, Solomon will examine how an industrial aesthetics of translatability both automates and destabilizes meaning – and ultimately permits a less gloomy interpretation of the novel’s ending.
Claire Solomon is associate professor of Hispanic studies and comparative literature at Oberlin College. She is the author of Fictions of the Bad Life: The Naturalist Prostitute and Her Avatars in Latin American Literature, 1880–2010 (Ohio State UP) and has published essays on anti-semitism, avant-garde theater, Manic Pixie Dream Girls, translation theory and contemporary music. She has translated Roberto Arlt, Lidia Falcón and Juan Goytisolo, and is currently writing a novel about higher education.
Sponsored by the Whitney Humanities Center and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese