Overview

Translation brings us literature from places as far away as Kenya, Ukraine, and Japan. You also do translation when you rephrase or put language better. So how can we use translation, whether between two different languages or within one language but with different words, for our own prose? After a brief discussion of some principles of translation, I will prompt student writers to translate/write from one text to another.

In addition, student writers will read writers such as Anton Chekhov, Edward P. Jones, Franz Kafka, Eudora Welty, and James Baldwin closely in order to translate these writers’ techniques, devices, and strategies into our own approach to craft. These aspects of craft can apply to fiction or nonfiction, short story or memoir. It’s ultimately this form of translation that turns our own ordinary experience into extraordinary prose and makes a real-life story as captivating as the stories of these masters of literary fiction.