William H. Matheson Lecture | February 20, 2025

Presentation Title: Acoustic Translation as Embodied Listening

Translation is an immersive experience more akin to listening to live music, and actively participating in a full acoustic event. Recreating how a source text sounds involves more than detecting figures of sound, phonic patterns that we try to approximate closely. Rather, sounds also communicate with our senses, prompt visual images, smells, tastes, tactile memories that we experience or intuit through simultaneous sensory associations.  Accordingly, acoustic translation attempts to bond English as closely as possible to the acoustic and affective range of the language of the source text and to make the tone, timbre and cadences of the original text breathe through the language of the translation as much as possible. 

Aron Aji, Director of MFA in Literary Translation, has joined the faculty in 2014. A native of Turkey, he has translated works by Bilge Karasu, Murathan Mungan, Elif Shafak, LatifeTekin, and other Turkish writers, including Karasu’s The Garden of Departed Cats, (2004 National Translation Award); and A Long Day’s Evening, (NEA Literature Fellowship; short-list, 2013 PEN Translation Prize). His forthcoming translations include Ferid Edgü’s Wounded Age and Eastern Tales (NYRB, 2022), and Mungan’s Tales of Valor (co-translated with David Gramling) (Global Humanities Translation Prize, Northwestern UP, 2022). Aji was president of The American Literary Translators Association between 2016-2019. He leads the Translation Workshop, and teaches courses on retranslation, poetry and translation; theory, and contemporary Turkish literature.