Overview
The Paideia Institute is excited to present Translation from the Classics to the Contemporary, a series of four online lectures offering perspectives on what it means to narrow the distance between texts and readers who inhabit different times, cultures, and languages, through the interpretive and receptive literary practice of translation.
Why do we continue to produce new translations of texts that have been translated many times before? How is the translation of ancient texts in the modern day shaped by the absence of translators who have native fluency in their source languages? What do we understand a “faithful” translation to be, and how do more poetic, deconstructive translations complicate and expand our reading of their source material?
Join us to explore these questions and more throughout the month of May, 2025.
Schedule
Thursday, May 1st at 7:00pm ET | Put Some English On It: Translating Greek and Latin Meter, with Christopher Childers
Friday, May 9th at 12:00pm ET | Translating Sappho and Tragedy, with Diane Rayor
Sunday, May 11th at 12:00pm ET | The Philosophy of Translation, with Damion Searls
Thursday, May 15th at 7:00pm ET | Translating while Female: Is the New Aeneid "Feminist"?, with Shadi Bartsch
(N.B. Participation in all four events is not required, we invite you to attend as many or as few lectures as you would like.)
Speakers
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Chris Childers
Chris Childers studied Classics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and poetry at Johns Hopkins University. He lives in Baltimore, where he teaches Latin, coaches squash and tennis and watches over his pet fish and budgies.
You can learn more about Chris Childers and his work by visiting his website: https://www.christopherchilderspoet.com/
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Diane Rayor
Diane J. Rayor, Professor Emerita of Classics at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, translates Greek poetry and drama, including Sappho: A New Translation of the Complete Works (2023, audio recording freely available: cambridge.org/sappho); Homeric Hymns (2nd ed. 2014); Euripides’ Medea (2013); Sophocles’ Antigone (2011); and Sappho’s Lyre: Archaic Lyric and Women Poets of Ancient Greece (1991). Euripides’ Helen and Hecuba are under contract with Cambridge. Her tragedy translations have been performed in Australia, Canada, Singapore, UK, and USA. For my theatre translation process see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGwU0X34cQk
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Damion Searls
Damion Searls has translated sixty books from German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch, including modern classics by Proust, Gide, and Nietzsche; Mann, Wittgenstein, and Rilke; Patrick Modiano, Victoria Kielland, and Ariane Koch; and the fiction of 2023 Nobel Prize winner Jon Fosse. A Guggenheim, Cullman Center, and two-time NEA fellow, he edited Thoreau's The Journal for NYRB Classics and is the author of The Inkblots: a history of the Rorschach test and biography of its creator. His latest books are The Philosophy of Translation and The Mariner's Mirror, a poetry chapbook.
Photo: Beowulf Sheehan
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Shadi Bartsch
Shadi Bartsch is the founding Director of the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge at the University of Chicago, and the Helen A. Regenstein Distinguished Service Professor of Classics. She has authored and edited some 12 books on antiquity. Her book Persius: A Study in Food, Philosophy, and the Figural received the Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit in 2016 and a translation of Vergil’s Aeneid was published to acclaim in 2022. Heer most recent book is a study of the reception of the Classics in contemporary China, Plato Goes to China. Bartsch has been a Guggenheim fellow, sits on the board of the AAR, edits the journal KNOW, and has held visiting scholar positions in Europe and Taiwan.
Thanks to the support of our donors and our institutional members, this lecture series is entirely free and open to the public. If you would like to make a donation in support of our free programming and our mission to expand access to the study of the Classics, please visit this page.
