Presented by Penn's Department of Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies and Public Trust
The Francophone, Italian & Germanic Studies Department at the University of Pennsylvania is pleased to present Mis(sed)translations: Problems/processes/products. Featuring presentations aligned with the department’s linguistic areas, including Nathan Dize from Washington University in St. Louis, on Francophone studies, Lawrence Venuti from Temple University, on Italian studies, and award-winning author and translator Damion Searls on German studies. With coffee breaks and a closing reception.
The first annual symposium of the Francophone, Italian & Germanic Studies Department at the University of Pennsylvania will probe wide gaps between texts and their translation(s) to ask what is left when a text is mistranslated, mishandled, or misused in another language — knowing full well that the answer is always something. Like Édouard Glissant, we do not subscribe to the fantasy of the literary text’s transparency and we concede that, to an extent, all translations are mistranslations or in the best-case scenario, the translation of one opacity into another opacity. Far from seeing this as a failure, we contend that there is much to learn about both sides of the (in)equation by closely examining mistranslations, inadvertent or intentional. For this symposium, we are particularly interested in willful mistranslations, in the widest possible distances between the original and its translations, and in manipulations for ideological ends within the academy and beyond. Never do we consider the products of these acts of mistranslation lightly, for we take Emily Apter at her word when she writes that “the stakes of mistranslation are deadly.” Integral to our discussion will be an epistemological reframing of the term mistranslation, and whether the term would be missed, if we were to do away with it.
Cosponsored by Penn's Department of Comparitive Literature & Literary Theory, Center for Italian Studies, and Wolf Humanities Center.
Nathan H. Dize is a translator of Haitian and Francophone Caribbean literature. His translations include the novels The Immortals and The Emperor by Makenzy Orcel, I Am Alive by Kettly Mars, Duels by Néhémy Pierre-Dahomey, and Antoine of Gommiers by Lyonel Trouillot. He has translated poetry and short prose from French and Haitian Creole (Kreyòl) by Jean D’Amérique, James Noël, and Évelyne Trouillot. He is also writing two books, Attending to the Dead: Haitian Literature and the Practice of Mourning (SUNY Press) and Handle with Care: Legacies of African American Translators of Francophone Literature (LSU Press). He is also a founding member of the Kwazman Vwa collective and a co-editor of the Global Black Writers in Translation Series at Vanderbilt University Press.
Damion Searls is a writer in English and an acclaimed translator of more than sixty books from German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch. He has translated and retranslated many modern classics, from Rilke, Proust, Gide, and Mann to Jelinek, Ariane Koch, three books by Patrick Modiano, and the fiction of Jon Fosse; he has also translated philosophy, including books by Nietzsche, Weber, and Wittgenstein. He edited the one-volume abridged edition of Thoreau's Journal for New York Review Books Classics, and has published fiction, poetry, essays, and The Inkblots, a history of the Rorschach test. His book The Philosophy of Translation was published in 2024 and hailed as "vast, generous, charming, and profound” by Jennifer Croft; and as “open, honest, and, most of all, smart... Remarkable,” by Percival Everett.
Lawrence Venuti, professor emeritus of English at Temple University, is a leading American translation theorist, translation historian, and a translator from Italian, French, and Catalan. His translation projects have won awards from the PEN American Center, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is, most recently, the author of Contra Instrumentalism: A Translation Polemic (2019), the editor of The Translation Studies Reader (4th edition, 2021), and the translator J. V. Foix’s Daybook 1918: Early Fragments (2019), which won the Global Humanities Translation Prize at Northwestern University, and of Dino Buzzati’s The Bewitched Bourgeois: Fifty Stories (2025).
