NYU SCHOOL OF PROFESSIONAL STUDIES CENTER FOR PUBLISHING & APPLIED LIBERAL ARTS CONTINUING EDUCATION PROGRAMS (PALA/CE)

Continuing Education Programs in Publishing, the Humanities, Arts, Producing, Design, Writing, and Translation.

Thomas M Devlin

The Art and Passion of Translation

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Left to Right: Alessandra Ginzburg, Giovanna Calvino, Jenny McPhee, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ann Goldstein, and Lynne Sharon Schwartz

An extraordinary panel of translators and writers celebrated Jenny McPhee’s new translation of Natalia Ginzburg’s novel, Family Lexicon, last Friday at Casa Italiana. The panel, composed entirely of women, was moderated by historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, and featured Jhumpa Lahiri, Ann Goldstein, Giovanni Calvino, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, and Jenny McPhee. As a surprise guest, Natalia Ginzburg’s daughter, Alessandra Ginzburg, also joined the discussion.

Natalia Ginzburg’s stories of her family were woven throughout the panelists wonderfully collaborative and enticing discussion about the art and science of translation. Among the many ideas explored were Jhumpa Lahiri’s vivid descriptions of climbing into the basement of the novel to examine the mechanics of a writer’s language. Jenny McPhee described Ginzburg’s writing as deceptively simple in style but extraordinarily complex in meaning, using uncomplicated language to reveal layers of meaning. 

Casa Italiana had a full house with an overflow room to accommodate as many guests as possible. The conversation, and the stories each woman told, to illuminate their relationship to writing, language, and to mining the depths of another’s writing when translating, were riveting. The serendipitous timing of McPhee’s translation of Lessico Famigliare was not lost on the panel, or the audience, given its relevance to our current political climate.

Family Lexicon has been receiving great reviews, including from Bookforum and the Los Angeles Review of Books, which said it was “masterfully translated.” You can also look at the book here.

To find out more about translation and literature, you can look through CALA’s course offerings for the summer semester and register today:

And for those of you who are serious about learning the art of translation, we also offer an MS in Translation.

Lastly, you can check out more of the pictures from the panel below courtesy of Suzanne Kaplan-Fonseca. Thank you all for such an inspiring event!

May 5th and 7th — Acting in the Zone Presents Scenes and Monologues

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The Producers Club

Join our Spring 2017 Acting in the Zone class as students perform their end-of-semester scenes and monologues. The event is happening at the Producers Club, 358 W. 44th Street at 8 p.m., and will have two performances: Friday, May 5th, and Sunday, May 7th. The event is free to the public, but seating is limited. Please RSVP to lg46@nyu.edu.

The performers this year are Jay Burstein, Candy Dato, Rafael Domenech, Susan Fields, Caroline Husted, Dennis Karagovalis, Therese McGinn, and Maxine Steinhaus.

If you want to get in on the action in the future, you should also check out our theater, music, and acting courses over the summer:

CALA Professor Francis Morrone to Give Lecture on Tuxedo Park’s Architect

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Lorillard Residence in Tuxedo Park

To those who have never made the trek up to Tuxedo Park, it almost sounds like a fictional name of a place in a book about the years before the depression. Interestingly, that’s not far off. The village, developed as a private hunting-and-fishing reserve by Pierre Lorillard II, which was host to famous New Yorkers like JP Morgan and William Waldorf Astor. The architect of the cottages in the area was Bruce Price, and his style went on to influence some of the most famous Modernist architects, including Frank Lloyd Wright.

Bruce Price’s name is not exactly mainstream, but at 3 p.m. this Saturday, August 22, CALA professor Francis Morrone will be giving a lecture on the man at the Tuxedo Historical Society. To find out more about the event, you can go to the official event page.

For more on the history of New York, Francis Morrone will also be teaching Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and the New York of their Time this summer. We also are offering three other historical tours of the city:

Los Angeles Review of Books: “I Know That Story!”: On Natalia Ginzburg’s “Family Lexicon”

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While “Italian writers” to many in the United States brings to mind Dante and Ferrante with nothing in between, it is unthinkable to omit the hundreds of other authors who come from that southern European country. One such author is Natalia Ginzburg, who wrote about family and fascism during the turbulent years of World War II and after. One of her books, Lessico famigliare (translated as Family Lexicon in its latest version), is being released next Tuesday, April 25, in a new translation by CALA’s own Jenny McPhee.

Eric Gudas recently reviewed the book in “‘I Know That Story!’: On Natalia Ginzburg’s ‘Family Lexicon'” for the Los Angeles Review of Books. As a summary of the plot, Gudas writes:

In her novel, Ginzburg, the daughter of a Jewish-born father and a Catholic-born mother — adamant nonbelievers and socialists both — grows up as the youngest of five siblings during Mussolini’s rise to power. The scene is Turin, home of an antifascist resistance movement into which Ginzburg’s family is increasingly drawn. The young Natalia Levi marries Leone Ginzburg, a Jewish Russian-Italian literary scholar active in the resistance, who will be killed in a Nazi prison before the war’s end, leaving his widow and their three children to return, eventually, to her parents’ home.

The book itself, of course, is not as simple as that. As the title suggests, the book places value on the modes of familial communication. In this review Gudas mentions that Family Lexicon comprises “fart jokes, mimicry, conversation scraps overheard in childhood and repeated for decades, loudly bellowed parental edicts and epithets, invented idioms, puns, libretto excerpts, doggerel, and, occasionally, lyric poems.”

It is books like these that make translation such an interesting art; when the English words must be chosen carefully to ensure they do not shift the intent of the original Italian. For anyone else interested in this process, CALA is hosting “Translation, Women, & Literature: A Panel Celebrating the Life and Work of Natalia Ginzburg.” The event, which will be next Friday, April 28, at NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimo, hosts a panel of six including Jenny McPhee, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ann Goldstein, and others. To RSVP to that event, you can click here.

For those who can’t make it to that event or simply want to dive deeper, CALA also offers a number of literature, writing and translation courses. Just a few relevant classes are listed below:

As always you can find more courses and information on our website. And of course, you can (and should) pre-order Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon now.

NYUIT: Capturing a Face: Björk, Masks, and 3D Scanning at LaGuardia Studio

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While 3D printing has largely been marketed as a great tool for product designers, it is becoming a common device for artists around the world. The word “common,” however, may not be the best adjective to describe one of the latest users: Björk. The Icelandic musician has partnered with MIT’s Mediated Matter Lab to create a complex mask based on her face.

Work on the mask, however, started at NYU’s LaGuardia studio, which scanned the face of the artist. You can read all about the process on the NYU Information Technology blog.

If you dream of one day making a mask of Björk’s face, or perhaps have any other ideas for the future of 3D printing, you can look at these courses from CALA:

If you want to learn more about the LaGuardia Studio, they offer this description:
The LaGuardia Studio provides advanced digital media and fabrication services to NYU faculty, students of the arts, scientific researchers, and visiting artists. Services at the facility, located at 545 LaGuardia Place, include museum-quality digital prints and 3D scanning and printing. Project consultations are available by request.

NYT: A Hard Look at Times Editing in the Digital Era

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A New York Times correction from 1975.

Despite what people in the comments section might say, the New York Times has one of the most elite editing staffs in the media. Editing is paramount to newspapers, mostly because there is no way to lose credibility faster than to use “effect” instead of “affect” or to leave a dangling modifier. And the editors serve a function more important than just making small grammar adjustments; they often are able to catch factual or structural errors that would otherwise be missed. Despite all of this, editors, and copyeditors especially, have been hit particularly hard by the changes in news media. Speed is becoming more important, and a larger portion of content is produced in video format.

Most recently, the Times public editor Liz Spayd wrote “A Hard Look at Times Editing in the Digital Era,” which reveals plans to make changes on the editorial side of the paper. The article makes clear that they value high-quality editing, but it is not particularly optimistic overall. One paragraph is particularly telling:

“The question is no longer whether the editing ranks will be squeezed. It is: How will it happen, when will it happen and how many positions will be lost?”

The Times has not yet laid out their full plans for rearranging the editing desk. There is just cause for this, as the news industry is indisputably different from how it was even 10 years ago. Still, it is a worrying prospect that perhaps speed will be prioritized over editing.

Despite all of this, copyediting will not disappear any time soon. For anyone interested in the field, CALA offers:

And if you are interested in looking at courses the address the digital changes coming to media, we have:

Study: Most Colleges Enroll Many Students Who Aren’t Prepared for Higher Education

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Donald Trump posing with Betsy DeVos, the current pick for Secretary of Education.


For most students, high school is not the end of education but a stepping stone to college. Ideally, then, high school would prepare everyone for the academic challenge of the college they attend. This is the very goal of the Common Core State Standards Initiative, which has been the subject of political controversy for years. Yet, according to a study by The Hechinger Report, over half a million students were enrolled in at least one remedial class in the last year alone. The study, titled “Most Colleges Enroll Many Students Who Aren’t Prepared for Higher Education,” found the majority of the colleges looked at accept students who need some form of remediation.

There are a number of factors at play here, but none of them completely excuse the failures of the U.S. primary and secondary education systems. For one, a number of first-time students are those not coming directly from high school, and thus it makes sense they may need refreshing. Still, this does not account for all of the students. The rates of remediation are higher at community colleges, so it may be tempting to write this off as a problem for lower-ranking colleges with open-door admission policies, but even in the various California State universities, “more than 40 percent of incoming freshman were deemed not ready for college-level work in at least one subject.” All in all, it points to a fundamental failure in a system that passes on its shortcomings to colleges and universities, which then have to catch up for students that were let down by their schools.

With Betsy DeVos, who is not a friend to the public school system, on track to become Secretary of Education, it is unlikely this situation will be repaired in the near future. Because of this, courses that promote professional writing and grammar are of utmost importance. Fortunately, the Center for Applied Liberal Arts has several offerings, including:

Mediashift Article: How the Global Fact-Checking Movement is Changing How We Train Journalists

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CNN is one of the news organizations that has increased its fact-checking this year.

Journalists are often considered the defenders of truth. Despite this, though, fact-checking has really only entered the mainstream in the past decade. It could simply be that before the internet and the 24-hour news cycle, people trusted that people were going to tell the truth as much as possible. The 2016 election has shown that this is not necessarily the case. Perhaps the greatest cause for the rise of fact-checking is that it’s reassuring to think that politicians cannot simply lie and get away with it anymore.

In “How the Global Fact-Checking Movement is Changing How We Train Journalists,” Michael W. Wagner writes about how fact-checking is going beyond being a fad, and is now an integral part of journalism. The article—co-authored by Lucas Graves who recently wrote the book Deciding What’s True: The Rise of Political Fact-Checking in American Journalism—looks at what makes journalists fact-check, and whether it really has an effect on audiences. I won’t spoil either of those answers here, however.

The article also mentions that Graves and Wagner are launching a course this month at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which will create a new fact-checking site called The Observatory. But, if you happen to want to take a course about this but don’t go to UWM, the Center for Applied Liberal Arts offers Research and Fact-Checking. The class is online and self-paced, and it covers everything you could want to know about fact-checking. And if we keep getting candidates like the ones this year, you will definitely want to know about fact-checking.

WSJ Article: The Classic Books You Haven’t Read

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3450264465_0958904c31_bEvery once in a while, I try to compose a list of classic books I feel that I must read. The list usually ends up being about 100 books long, including Charles Dickens, Plato, and Virginia Woolf. I spend a few months and check a few off the list. Then, inevitably, I start to feel pressured by the length of it. I realize I forgot a classic like Madame Bovary and the list starts getting longer instead of shorter. I start reading as fast as possible, and if a new book comes out that I really want to read, I force myself to ignore it.

Eventually, I destroy the list — sometimes by throwing it into a fire, to make it as dramatic as possible.

Fortunately, I am not alone in my feelings of guilt for not reading the Classics with a capital “C.” Journalist Erin Geiger Smith explores the topic in a piece for the Wall Street Journal, “The Classic Books You Haven’t Read.” She talks to a number of people, from published authors to a high school English teacher, about the books they haven’t read. Many of them agree, having “book guilt” is pretty unproductive, considering so few people have read all of the Classics. The article is definitely worth the read, especially as a way to put off starting Ulysses just a little bit longer.

If you do want to check a few books off your list, however, you could check out one of our Fall 2016 literature courses:

New York Times Article: After Years Underground, a Subway Singer Gets the Spotlight

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George Etheredge/The New York Times
George Etheredge/The New York Times

During the rush of a commute, it’s easy to ignore the people busking in the subway. Their voices blend into the general hubbub. Fortunately, sometimes one voice rises above, and that’s what happened for Alice Tan Ridley.

CALA professor Susan Hartman’s profile of Ridley, “After Years Underground, a Subway Singer Gets the Spotlight,” tells the story of her fascinating life. Ridley has sung in the Herald Square subway station for 30 years. This has been broken up a bit, however, by appearances on America’s Got Talent and a national music tour. Learning that her daughter is Academy Award-nominated actress Gabourey Sidibe is barely surprising after reading about the rest of her life.

Despite an album that recently came out, Ridley still returns from time to time to the Herald Square subway station. Next time you’re in the area, it might be worth paying a little more attention to who’s singing.

Courses Susan Hartman is Teaching this Fall: