James Dunnigan

“Modernism: The Re-Renaissance?”

In an essay on Early Modern translators of the classics, Ezra Pound claims that “a great age of literature is perhaps a great age of translations” (232). Citing Gavin Douglas’ Scots rendition of Virgil’s Aeneid, Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Christopher Marlowe’s version of the Amores, Pound associates the glories of Early Modern translation to his own practice and to those of peers, like H.D. and Yeats, all translators of authors like Homer, Euripides, Sophocles and Propertius. When scholars compare modernist translation strategies to Early Modern ones, however, they tend to spot divergences instead of similarities. Stephen Yao notably argues that “literary translation” before modernism “functioned primarily as a means for renewing and strategically deploying the authority of the classics”: modernist translations being generally more irreverent, creative and less academically faithful to their originals (10). My talk will problematize these claims. I argue that by aiming to translate classical texts into a current “vernacular” idiom, modernist translation renews, rather than refutes, the ideals of Renaissance translation. I will view modernist translation not just as an attempt to renew the pertinence of the classics, but as part of a broader attempt to initiate a second Renaissance in the twentieth century.

Hong Liu

“Richard, Interrupted: Richard II (1597) as Trauerspiel”

One story goes that “Shakespearean histories” as a genre was canonized in 18th century Germany during the heyday of Idealism. The turn to history in philosophy leads to the reception of such plays as narratives of national history and as justifications for historical progress understood as the resolutions of tragic conflicts. This interpretation, however, underestimates early modern theater’s nuanced negotiation between ideological conformity and historical contingencies. Walter Benjamin’s revival of the Trauerspiel puts pressure on this conflation of historical progression with tragic resolution. Trauerspiel, glossed as mourning play, foregrounds a thematic and formal emphasis on lament and theatricality, resisting the notion of coherent tragic action. Trauerspiel complicates Aristotle’s “probability” and delves instead into the drama of failed potentialities, inaction, and undoing; it reorients the tragic in terms of historical and rhythmic interruptions. In this presentation, I reconsider Richard II as a play of interruptions both thematic and formal. The play portrays Richard’s sovereignty as itself an exercise in interruption, marked by linguistic digressions and performative interludes finally culminating in his own ritual of undoing. Such interruptions highlight the play’s theme of “untimeliness”: from Richard’s perpetual allegoresis of “time broke” to the new king’s lament of the old king’s “untimely bier.” Finally, the new king’s promise to embark on a pilgrimage seeks to contain the untimely interruptions, only to be cut short by the play’s conclusion, underscoring rather than resolving the sense of historical discordance.