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Speakers): Dr. Bethany Wiggin (University of Pennsylvania)

This paper provides an intermission in current critical discussions figuring translation as handmaid to a world literature cast in turn as the flavorless prose of global capital. Drawing on recent collaborative work probing Untranslatables in German literary culture, including Goethe’s "Divan", we might explore what happens when we remove translation from its instrumental role and allow it to play otherwise. Rendering translation visible changes the very scene of literature. No longer an encounter between reader and national author-genius, literature itself is instantiated in a three-way conversation between author, translator, and reader. Here, the translator’s role is no empty vessel, but rather interpreter, even prophet: a role that returns us to historical meanings of translation before Luther’s "dolmetschen", i.e., from the medieval into early modernity to translate was "diuten" (to translate and to interpret). Thus we might ask: Is the role of the translator best played by a cleric? Or does this casting present another critical orthodoxy of the church of literature in need of reformation?

Bethany Wiggin is the author of Novel Translations: The European Novel and the German Book (Cornell UP, 2011) as well as of the forthcoming Germanopolis: Utopia Found and Lost in Penn's Woods (Penn State UP, 2015). She is editor of two essay collections and one special issue all concerning translation, multilingualism and world literature and another co-edited collection on early modern textual, sexual and disabled bodies. Essays on globalism and the emergence of consumer culture, fashion, writing against slavery, and mysticism across the Atlantic world have appeared in leading journals. A proponent of public history, she is co-founder of Germantown Youth Scholars, an initiative to teach high school students research methods in local archives, and, with past and present undergraduate and graduate students, a founding co-editor of "Notes for a Hotter Planet", a digital platform for critical, visual, and creative work in the environmental humanities, co-sponsored by the Green Campus Partnership and the Penn Humanities Forum. She is an Associate Professor and Undergraduate Chair of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania as well as Associate Faculty in English.