COML1340 - In Babel: Translation and Narration in the Jewish World

“Modern Jewish culture speaks with many voices,” wrote the poet, translator, and scholar Benjamin Harshav. In this course, we will echo these voices by exploring how Jewish life was shaped by cross-cultural contact and exchange with non-Jews and other Jewish communities, by studying literary manifestations of multilingualism, translation, adaptation, and circulation of texts and ideas. With a wide variety of texts - fiction, poetry, historiography, and literary criticism - from different languages and cultural contexts, this course will address several fundamental questions about, on the one hand, the ways Jews translated texts for Jewish readers, and, on the other, how Jewish experiences and traditions were translated for broader audiences. In a broader sense, we will consider what is at stake in translating Jewishness and how cultural and linguistic borders are crossed and discussed in different historical contexts.
Course assessment is comprised of two short response papers to key concepts and a literary text (with the option for a creative format), and a final paper that can be either research-based or a translation and a translator’s introduction.
All materials will be available in English but students are encouraged to read materials in their original languages if they are fluent.