Keynote Speaker and Workshop Leader: John E. Woods
John E. Woods was born in Indiana in 1942. He has worked as an editor and is the translator from the German of over forty books. Among the authors he has translated are Thomas Mann, Alfred Döblin, Arno Schmidt, Patrick Süskind, Christoph Ransmayr, Libuše Moníková, and Ingo Schulze. His prizes and awards include the American Book Award for Translation and the PEN Translation Prize (1981) for Arno Schmidt, Evening Edged in Gold (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980); the PEN Translation Prize (1987) for Patrick Süskind, Perfume (Simon & Schuster, 1987); the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for Translation (1990) for Christoph Ransmayr, The Last World (Grove Press, 1990); the PEN West Literary Award in Translation, the German Literary Prize of the American Translator’s Association, and an Outstanding Translation Award of the American Literary Translation Association (1995) for Arno Schmidt, Collected Novellas (Dalkey Archive Press, 1994); the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize (1996) for Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (Knopf/Everyman’s Library, 1995) and Arno Schmidt, Nobodaddy’s Children (Dalkey Archive Press, 1995). In 2008 he was awarded the prestigious Goethe Medal of the Federal Republic of Germany for his contribution to making German culture available to English-speaking readers. He is currently working on a translation of Arno Schmidt’s Zettel’s Traum (Eng. Bottom’s Dream) and hopes to be finished in early 2012. He lives in Berlin, Germany.
COLLOQUIUM KEYNOTE: The Larry Wells Memorial Lecture
Friday, April 20, 2012
5:15 p.m. – 6:45 p.m.
Location: The Anderson Center for the Performing Arts Reception Room
John E. Woods, Berlin, “Einzelgänger”
“Einzelgänger.” Is that a Doppelgänger at your door? A body-double, a wraith, a look-alike? Or is it another kind of phantom? A lone wolf, a misfit, a maverick, a solipsist? By playing these two words and concepts off one another, John E. Woods will attempt to describe what makes a translator tick, or at least this particular translator ― and perhaps to resolve the conflicts between the lone wolf at your door and the body-double that you expected. His thirty-five-year career as a loner began when he started hearing voices, or in this case one particular voice, that of Arno Schmidt. And then came a cacophony of voices he wanted to hear in his mother tongue. What follows is something akin to an apologia pro vita sua, a look at or, better perhaps, a listen to those voices. The ultimate goal, however, is to relate his task as a translator to yours as academics. Are our two phantoms at loggerheads? Or is there a middle ground, some spot where voices sing in harmony?
The Larry Wells Memorial Lecture
Named in honor of Larry Wells, esteemed colleague and Professor of German at Binghamton University, State University of New York, from 1970 to 1998, this lecture series is made possible by the generous support of the Wells Family. The annual Larry Wells Memorial Lecture brings nationally and internationally recognized scholars in German Studies to the Binghamton University campus. The Wells Lecture highlights the work of the Binghamton German Studies program and, inspired by Professor Wells’ outstanding achievements in student-centered teaching, research, outreach and service in German Studies, builds upon the legacy of his work and his distinguished record in the profession.
COLLOQUIUM WORKSHOP with John E. Woods
Saturday, April 21, 2012
1:15 p.m. – 3:15 p.m.
Location: The Anderson Center for the Performing Arts Reception Room
The workshop led by John E. Woods will go back to that first voice, Arno Schmidt’s. In particular it will look at how the complexities of metafiction (megafiction?), in this case Schmidt’s Zettel’s Traum/Bottom’s Dream, can find some approximation(s) in a second language. He asks participants to don their fools caps and ass’s ears, and gambol through page one of that legendary text.