Philip Boehm on Translating Dangerously Ambiguous Narratives

“Literature like life is full of ambiguities, and their presence in a text helps convey the complexity of human relations. For Gerard Manley Hopkins an ambiguous line may be intended to help the reader approach something ineffable–while in a poem by Osip Mandelstam it might conceal a message deemed so dangerous by the state it could cost a poet’s life.

So what happens to these ambiguities when we as translators take a text out of one context and plop it into another? How do we preserve modify transform or metamorphose danger?”

Philip Boehm is an award winning American playwright, theater director and literary translator. Fluent in English, German and Polish, he has directed plays in Poland and Slovakia. Boehm has translated over thirty novels and plays, including Herta Müller, Franz Kafka and Hanna Krall.

Sponsored by Five College Innovative Language Teaching Grant, Roddenberry Grant, Culture Brain and Development Grant, School of Cognitive Science, and Ethics & the Common Good.