John Felstiner, translator of Neruda and Celan, to lecture Nov. 18 and 22

John Felstiner, Cornell Society for the Humanities' invited scholar on translation, will be on campus to deliver two talks Nov. 18 and 22.

The subject of Felstiner's first lecture is "Literary Translation and the Art of Loss," to be held Thursday, Nov. 18, at 4:30 p.m. in Goldwin Smith Hall's Kaufmann Auditorium. His second lecture, "Speak Through My Words: Translating Pablo Neruda," will be held Monday, Nov. 22, at 4:30 p.m. in the Guerlac Room of the A.D. White House.

Felstiner is a professor of English at Stanford University. His first book, The Lies of Art: Max Beerbohm's Parody and Caricature (1972), has to do with parody, but his teaching and writing now concern modern poetry in various forms. A year of teaching North American poetry in Chile led to Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu (1980), which won the Commonwealth Club Gold Medal, and led to an interest in literary translation. His Pablo Neruda and Paul Celan translations won first and second prizes, respectively, from the British Comparative Literature Association. During the 1970s, Felstiner developed critical approaches to poetry by civilians and soldiers from the Vietnam era. After a year of teaching at Hebrew University in Israel, he began to study and teach the literature that emerged from the Holocaust in Europe. Felstiner's commitment is to Jewish studies and to the practical, interpretive and theoretical implications of literary translation. His current project is on poetry and environmental awareness.

Felstiner has held Guggenheim, Rockefeller, National Endowment for the Humanities and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. His book on the German-speaking Jewish poet, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (1995), won the Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award and the Modern Language Association's James Russell Lowell prize. Felstiner has edited the award-winning Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology and Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan.

For more information about Felstiner's visit, contact Mary Ahl at the Society for the Humanities, 255-4086, or e-mail mea4@cornell.edu.