In the first part of this talk, Prof. José Alaniz, associate professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Department of Comparative Literature (adjunct) at the University of Washington, Seattle, will examine the theory and practice of translating comics (graphic narrative), with an emphasis on Russian comics.

Prof. Alaniz has published two books, Komiks: Comic Art in Russia (University Press of Mississippi, 2010) and Death, Disability and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond (UPM, 2014). He chaired the Executive Committee of the International Comic Arts Forum (ICAF), a leading US comics studies conference, from 2011 to 2017. He is also a founding board member of the Comics Studies Society and served as director of the UW Disability Studies Program from 2014 to 2018. He is currently translating Lena Uzhinova’s 2014 graphic memoir My Sex.

In the second part, Prof. Jason Groves will attend to, and tentatively advocate for, the low threshold of plausibility and admissibility for “translation” in a range of literary texts and practices, following recent articulations of "weak theory" and "weak environmentalism"—with “weak” variously understood in non-derogatory senses of partial, provisional, centrifugal, leaky, impromptu, reparative, etc.

Prof. Groves is assistant Professor in the Department of Germanics and the author of The Geological Unconscious: German Literature and the Mineral Imaginary (Fordham UP, forthcoming Spring 2020). He is the cotranslator of Werner Hamacher’s Minima Philologica(Fordham UP, 2016) and translator of Sonja Neef’s The Babylonian Planet: Culture, Translation, and Deconstruction Under the Conditions of Globalization(under review). Other translations include “Geography of the Fürth Departure Center” in An Atlas of Radical Cartography (Journal of Aesthetics and Protest Press, 2007) and the film Schattenparker (2007),by the indymedia collective cine rebelde, available at archive.org….

Light snacks will be provided, feel free to bring your lunch.