TWO LINES in the Classroom

A cool blog post over at the blog of Clockroot Books (which does excellent work with translated literature) about teaching literature int he classroom--with TWO LINES:

Last week in my undergraduate creative writing class, my friend David Bartone and I co-taught a “translation day” (in preparation for reading Kassandra and the Wolf this week…). It went like this: we selected two poems from the Center for the Art of Translation’s Two Lines anthology “Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed,” in this case Andrej Glusgold’s “I Love Berlin” and “Elementary Particles,” translated by Donna Stonecipher. First we distributed only the original German text. We translated most of the first poem together as a class, using “gut” translations—no dictionaries, just everyone’s own ideas of what was meant, or should be meant, by such words as “Schlaf” and “Herpes,” etc. (success rate with the second was high). Then we divided the class into small groups, half of which had dictionaries, half of which didn’t. The half with dictionaries were to translate the second poem creatively, to make the best and most creative poem; the half without dictionaries were to translate it for accuracy. At the end everyone could vote on each other’s, just to add a little competition. All in all, it was an excellent day and really I should be able to offer here some of the great lines people came up with.

Wouldn't it be a much better world if more undergrad literature courses had a translation day (particularly since most courses use a translation at some point, be it as a book or a text in a class reader)? And of course, wouldn't it be a truly awesome world if translation was taught in these classes with TWO LINES?