The concept: Creative writing is creative translation, and vice-versa.
Creative writing can mean writing one’s own “original” text in one or more languages.
Creative translation is literary translation: the work of writing a new text into being, of bringing a creative work from one language into another, in one of many possible ways.
In this class, students wrote their own poems and short creative prose pieces, then worked together to create translations of one another’s work.
Along the way, students read and discussed exemplary critical texts as an introduction to translation studies and theory.
Students also translated classic and contemporary model poems and short prose pieces across a range of traditions and languages.
We were grateful during this difficult semester — unable to meet together in Shanghai and, like so many others, relegated to online collaboration — to work with three visiting writers and literary translators: Ravi Shankar, Matt Turner, and Sun Dong.
We were also grateful to work with materials provided by Eleanor Goodman in support of our discussion of Qin Xiaoyu and Wu Feiyue’s 2015 documentary on Chinese workers poetry, 我的诗篇, translated by Goodman as Iron Moon (also known as Verse of Us) during a time when the question of what comprises “essential work” became more essential — and difficult — than ever.
Thank you, too, to the NYU Shanghai Writing Program and the NYU Shanghai Creative Writing Minor!
Here is a modified version of the syllabus (which underwent a number of changes as circumstances demanded):