Translating the Local
MALS 7400 / CL 89400, CUNY Graduate Center, Spring 2026
Prof. Esther Allen (www.estherallen.com)
Thursdays, 6:30 – 8:30 pm
GC Room 5382
Office Hours: GC 4116.15, Thursdays 4:30 – 6:15 pm & by appointment
19th-century European translation theory (Schleiermacher, etc.) generally conceptualized it as a negotiation between a faraway foreign and a familiar, present mother tongue: translation as bridge across vast expanses of spatial, temporal, and cultural distance. This model emerges during the European Renaissance and is a core feature of “high culture,” as the names engraved across the façades of 19th & 20th-century neoclassical library buildings remind us. Theorists such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Sherry Simon, and Michael Cronin have instead focused on the everyday reality of multilingual contiguous spaces in all their polyglossia and dialogism, viewed by Bakhtin as the wellspring of the novel genre itself. In his recent Language City, Ross Perlin argues that New York is among the most multilingual spaces ever to have existed in human history. Taking NYC as a primary point of comparison with other urban centers (“There are no monolingual cities,” Simon writes), this course considers forms of local multilingualism and resistance to monolingualism as a basis for new literary modes and new approaches to the theory and practice of translation at the intersection of language, place, community, and history.
Course texts:
Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Michael Holquist & Caryl Emerson (1982)
Ross Perlin, Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York (2025)
Yoko Tawada, Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue, trans. Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda (2025)
(Please acquire paperbacks of Perlin and Tawada)
Select additional bibliography:
Kelly Kreitz, Printing Nueva York: Spanish-Language Print Culture, Media Change, & Democracy in the Late 19th Century (2026). Launch event February 28, South Street Seaport Museum
Jennifer Scappettone, Poetry After Barbarism: The Invention of Motherless Tongues & Resistance to Fascism (2025)
Haun Saussy, The Making of Barbarians: Chinese Literature & Multilingual Asia (2023)
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, The Language of Languages: Reflections on Translation (2023)
Yoko Tawada, Scattered All Over the Earth, trans. Margaret Mitsutani(2022) (novel)
Sherry Simon, ed., Speaking Memory: How Translation Shapes City Life (2016)
Vicente Rafael, Motherless Tongues: The Insurgency of Language amid Wars of Translation (2016)
José Manuel Prieto, Encyclopedia of a Life in Russian, trans. Esther Allen(2013) (novel)
Yasemin Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition (2012)
Michael Cronin, Translation & Identity (2006)
Vassilis Alexakis, Foreign Words, trans. Alyson Waters (2006) (novel)
Doris Sommer, ed. Bilingual Games: Some Literary Investigations (2003)
Werner Sollors, ed. Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American literature (1998)
Addison Bale, “On Translation, Codification, and Something in Between: Language in the Paintings of Martin Wong.” HopscotchTranslation.com (March 2025)
Urayoan Noel, Transversal (2021) (poetry)
Gabriel Dozal, The Border Simulator, trans. into Spanish by Natasha Tiniacos (2023) (poetry)
Coursework:
Students enrolled for four credits:
- Research and personally engage with two (or more, if so inclined) ongoing New York City cultural/political initiatives that support a given language/culture or promote multilingualism. (See the Resources section of the blog for handful of initiatives that we will keep adding to.) You are invited to write these posts in the style of Tawada’s Exophony, if so inclined. Ideally, the initiatives you choose to write about will be related to your final project for the class. Blog post about the first initiatives is due February 26; second blog post is due March 26.
- Post a one-page outline / abstract of your final project topic on the class blog by April 16.
- Give a 20-minute talk, at the level of a professional conference presentation, on your final project. (Presentations scheduled for the two final class sessions.)
- Write a 15-20 page final paper, due by May 19, that can be
- An account of a specific urban translation history. (For example, the translation history of Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York.)
- A close analysis of a specific urban multilingual literary/cultural phenomenon and its relationship to the environment that produced it. (Example: the multilingual poetry of Singapore.)
- An original translation of a previously untranslated work that emerges from and engages with the urban dialogism and polyglossia that are at the center of this course, accompanied by a critical introduction and annotations.
If you have an idea for a final project that doesn’t fit into any of these categories, that’s great; let’s talk about it.
Students enrolled for three credits:
All of the above, with final paper of 10-15 pages.
