CONGRESS CANCELED Medieval Becomings: Animal: Animals, Language, and Translation
Description
In Abu ibn Khalawayh’s tenth-century lexicographical treatise The Names of the Lion, translated by David Larsen in 2017 as poetry, human epithets for lions exemplify the extraordinary creativity and precision of the Arabic language and (in Larsen’s iteration) the eccentric generativity of medieval linguistic minds. The Names of the Lion also provokes questions about the place of non-human linguistic capacity in medieval language scholarship, and about how the cultural and historical violence of translation overlaps with (or opposes) species violence and the appropriation of animals as alibis for human political violence. In this panel, we welcome all proposals that address the overlapping concerns of animal studies and of the politics of language and/or translation. Papers might address animality and linguistic racialization, the gendering of medieval animal voices, medieval becomings-animal in poetic translation, the material use of animal bodies in language pedagogy, “foreignizing” and “domesticating” translations of the nonhuman, and anything else the cat drags in. David Coley
CONGRESS CANCELED Medieval Becomings: Animal: Animals, Language, and Translation
Fetzer 2040
In Abu ibn Khalawayh’s tenth-century lexicographical treatise The Names of the Lion, translated by David Larsen in 2017 as poetry, human epithets for lions exemplify the extraordinary creativity and precision of the Arabic language and (in Larsen’s iteration) the eccentric generativity of medieval linguistic minds. The Names of the Lion also provokes questions about the place of non-human linguistic capacity in medieval language scholarship, and about how the cultural and historical violence of translation overlaps with (or opposes) species violence and the appropriation of animals as alibis for human political violence. In this panel, we welcome all proposals that address the overlapping concerns of animal studies and of the politics of language and/or translation. Papers might address animality and linguistic racialization, the gendering of medieval animal voices, medieval becomings-animal in poetic translation, the material use of animal bodies in language pedagogy, “foreignizing” and “domesticating” translations of the nonhuman, and anything else the cat drags in. David Coley