By Claire Sabel, CC '13

Though lost to history, we are working to bring you whatever we can from the May issue of The Blue & White. Here, Allie Curry explains how we are able to read things not written in English, even though we won’t pay for the convenience.

The headline of a 2003 New York Times piece on the matter states it best: “America Yawns at Foreign Fiction”. Statistics confirm this—Americans don’t buy literary works in translation and major publishing conglomerates don’t publish them. Nonetheless, academics at Columbia fight for new, liminal, and innovatively funded spaces to study and support literary translators.

The Core Curriculum at Columbia College and Nine Ways of Knowing at Barnard College are inheritors of a tradition that values fiction, poetry, and prose for its transnational and transhistorical influence rather than its “trendiness” or sales potential. Point of fact, English is a relatively new development in the history of the Western Canon, especially as Lit Hum conceives it. Including the Biblical and Masoretic texts, only three of the 23 works on the standard Lit Hum syllabus were authored in English and two of those three—Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse—are arguably the most hotly contested additions to the second semester of the course. This is similarly the case in many of Barnard’s First-Year Seminars where at least three Reinventing Literary History concentrations (which are focused on Classic and Great Books texts, “Women and Culture,” and pan-American literature) substantially incorporate translated works. Individual sections of these courses, however, vary wildly in terms of translation cognizance. Helene Foley, Professor of Classics, for one, believes that most students think “very little in general” of issues raised when reading literary works in translation. (more…)

…on 4/20. Anna Bahr details her journey below. Read this and more in the May issue of The Blue & White, right on the tail of the April issue, on campus this week.

As admitted freshman pare down their college choices in late April, arbitrary details become critical factors in the decision making process. Remember that Princeton visit? It was raining, and the telling scab at the corner of your tour guide’s mouth said more about social dynamics than Fiske.

But if you visited Columbia on April 20th, a veritable utopia awaited you: The College Dream. This one day, taken entirely out of context, is the college experience you wish you’d had. College Walk has never looked so good. As one elderly woman noted, you could, “smell that cannabis” wafting through the sweet spring air. This is Columbia, packaged for the prospie fortunate enough to witness this great university through the haze of 420.

Soaking up the gusto of four CC undergrads (“we’re in Columbia College—THE college”) in powder blue “Tour Guides!” t-shirts, I followed the loudest of the bunch after his confident declaration that “My tour will be the best.” This was my man.

Illustration by Adela Yawitz, CC '12

The group first paused in front of St. Paul’s: “Have you kids heard of Vampire Weekend?” Solemn nods. “Right? They’re a pretty cool band!” [.......] “And they got their start right here.” One enthused woman jotted and underlined on her legal pad, “Music. Starts. Here.”

I should mention that our guide was not your average prepschool overachieving prick. This kid could not live without the university; his grandmother’s water literally broke in the foyer of John Jay. She honored her newborn with the middle name “Jay.”

But don’t get the wrong idea. Our pious Virgil wasn’t accepted as a legacy. He is smart. And he totally gets Columbia elitism—that shit isn’t inherited, it’s earned. Which he proved by mentioning his full-ride scholarship to USC (“Which I obviously turned down. I value my academics.”) twice.

We ambled past an endearingly stoned fraternity brother who shook his PBR-concealing paper bag in our direction and wished us, “Happy Holidays.” As if on cue, two star rugby players shouted a rousing, masculine greeting at our guide. “Those guys,” he waxed, “we call ‘em the Tweedledee and Tweedledum of the squad.” Everyone laughed. Because we were in on the joke.

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