James Wells, "Magical Experiments with Words: Translation as Apprenticeship in Poetic Craft"

Description: In this talk I share my practice of translation as an apprenticeship in the craft of poetry. Just as the study and the performed creative interpretation of another musician’s score enables the composer to deepen their knowledge and skills and further inspires original composition, ancient poetic texts, which I encounter as a philologist and creatively interpret as a translator, ongoingly expand and refine my skills in the use of my poetic instrument: language. This talk sounds out ideas for a prospective book project that will thread together personal narrative and Classical Reception.

Biography: James Bradley Wells is a poet, translator, and scholar. His classics publications include Pindar’s Verbal Art (Center for Hellenic Studies, 2009), a study of speech and performance in Pindar’s victory songs, and two translations, Vergil’s Eclogues and Georgics (University of Wisconsin Press, 2022) and HoneyVoiced: Pindar’s Victory Songs (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024). Wells has published one poetry collection, Bicycle (Sheep Meadow Press, 2013), and one poetry chapbook, The Kazantzakis Guide to Greece (Finishing Line Press, 2015). His poetry and translations have appeared widely in creative writing journals and magazines. Wells is the Edwin L. Minar Professor of Classical Studies at DePauw University and lives in Bloomington, Indiana, where he and his partner, the environment and food systems researcher Stacey Giroux, tend MorrowHaven Gardens and feline kin.

This talk will not be available on zoom and will not be recorded.