The Masters of Fine Arts in Literary Translation at the University of Iowa is one of only a handful of similar programs worldwide. A key facet, the 60-year-old UI Translation Workshop, predates the MFA program by a decade.
Boasting the title of “the country’s first translation workshop in a university setting,” it took shape during Paul Engle’s tenure as director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1963. The MFA program would emerge from the Translation Workshop in 1974, founded by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Daniel Weissbort.
Events celebrating the 60th anniversary begin on Thursday, Oct. 12 at 6:30 p.m. at the Old Capitol Building: Spivak will make an appearance as part of the Iowa City Book Festival. Two days later, at 4 p.m. on Oct. 14, the Iowa City Public Library will host Patchwork: A Reading of Literary Translation featuring students in the Literary Translation MFA Program.
MFA candidates come from a range of academic backgrounds, all dedicated to precise translations and making texts more “accessible.” Some, like alum Kelsi Vanada, stumble on the discipline while following other pursuits.
“Literary translation wasn’t a practice I had known was even an option for me until I started taking translation workshops in the International Writing Program (IWP) while I was getting my MFA in Poetry at the Writers’ Workshop,” Vanada said via email.
She “found literary translation to be the perfect blend of my love of creative writing and my love of languages.”
After finishing her MFA in poetry, Vanada started the Translation Program and is now program director at ALTA (the American Literary Translators Association and the country’s largest organization dedicated to literary translation). She’s also published eight complete books of translation from Spanish and Swedish.
“I had a unique early experience because, in the IWP translation workshops, I got to sit right next to the poets I worked with and ask them any question I wanted in person,” Vanada added. “It was such a daunting task at first (well, it still is) that in the entire semester of my first workshop, I translated just TWO poems.”
Vanada’s timidity led to a common error in her translations. “Like with most new translators, out of respect for the original text, I stuck very close to the original grammar, which we call ‘translatese’ because it usually leads to bad writing in English,” she recalled. “Now I know, thanks to the example and mentorship of many wonderful translators, that the best translation is a poem that works in English.”
Translators may work on any project that excites them in the Translation Workshop — the only part of their curriculum in which the students get to present translations-in-progress and critique one another in real time. Ara Javaheri, a current graduate student in the MFA Program, said that this is the first time she’s been in a space in which everyone is working in English.
“When I read translations from other people I think, ‘OK, this sounds like this,’ and we talk about it and the translator asks, ‘OK, how does this sound to you?’ It’s so interesting that the thing that is most important to me now is how can I perfectly translate what [the text] is trying to say with the same voice, the same register, the same characters, the same story.”
Being in this group of careful translators made Javaheri more sensitive to the nuances of translation. “Now I think, ‘This is how the English sounds, this is how the Farsi sounds. Is it the same?’”
Javaheri, who has done translation in Iran for several years, said that the collaborative nature of the MFA program is what makes it stand out. “Everyone is so invested in not only their own work but in everyone else’s. We spend hours in workshop on a single sentence and everyone is so invested. It’s not even your own sentence!”
For Vanada, the program stands out, “because it gives support and credibility and camaraderie to those of us working in a pretty small field in the U.S., treating our work as both art and labor, and teaching us also how to do the work around translating, such as the research, writing critical introductions, pitching and publishing books, etc.”
According to Javaheri, Aron Aji (the director of the MFA in Literary Translation) “usually refers to it as a ‘playground’” — an accurate assessment by Javaheri’s own estimation.
“You can be free to translate whatever you want, find your true passion,” she said. “Find that thing that makes you happy and when you leave you know what you love and what you can do and you have been trained so well.”
This article was originally published in Little Village’s October 2023 issue.
