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International Center for Writing and Translation
Mission Statement
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Director
Karen Lawrence, Dean of Humanities
The International Center for Writing and Translation in the School of Humanities fosters writing, translation, and criticism in multilingual and international contexts. The Center possesses an international scope, a focus that champions writing, and an earnest exploration of translation as a challenge and practice. It links existing faculty research interests in cultural literacy to general discussions about linguistic and cultural issues relevant to the diverse, multiethnic and multilinguistic student population at UCI and to the population of California more generally. Through its support of writers, critics, and translators, the Center cultivates an awareness of the international world of letters and steers research and creative activities in the Humanities in vital, new directions.
The following goals are integral to the general mission of the Center:
1. supporting writers working in various languages and diverse genres, including fiction and creative nonfiction, through grants and residencies
2. fostering research and discussion of the theory, practice, aesthetics, and politics of translation, broadly conceived
3. supporting translations of work of literary merit (in partnership with the International Institute of Modern Letters in Las Vegas, Nevada)
4. sponsoring conferences, workshops, and public fora on writing and translation, as well as readings and performances
5. supporting activities of UCI faculty, students, and the surrounding community involving the far-reaching themes of cultural literacy and cross-cultural transposition
Background
The term international signifies the mutual influence of multiple languages and national traditions. It also includes, however, not only international relations and transnational movements (across national borders), but also manifestations of multiple cultures and languages within national boundaries. Immigration and transnational movement in individual nation states have produced a globalization of the local, an issue to be investigated by the Center. The Center's exploration of translation and writing in multilingual contexts includes this expanded sense of "international."
The Center's focus on writing includes a concern with the "literary" aspects of texts, and with the production, transmission, and reproduction of texts, especially poetry, fiction and drama. Research will examine the impact of genre, periodization, and medium on both definitions and transformations of the literary. However, the term "writing" extends beyond the "literary" to nonfictional genres. These genres span environmental, historical, biographical, autobiographical, travel, and journalistic forms of writing. Departments in the School of Humanities are concurrently developing a Ph.D. emphasis in creative nonfiction, as well as in translation.
The concept of translation has traditionally meant interlingual translation, or the transposition of texts from one language to another, but it also includes general instances of cultural exchanges among different nations, languages, cultures, and media. Translation, then, moves beyond and around language. In this light, the Center explores the political work of translation as a dual imperative to preserve texts in their original language, especially lesser known languages, and to disseminate work more widely through translation into English and other world languages. Rigorous discussion of questions of cultural identity and assimilation that are raised by acts of translation will continue to provoke interest in students who participate in clubs and associations that celebrate native languages or heritage.
Ngugi wa Thiong'o is the newly named Director of the Center and Distinguished Professor at UC Irvine. A novelist, playwright and essayist, Ngugi wa Thiong'o is a prominent Kenyan writer and scholar of African literature; he comes to the International Center for Writing and Translation from New York University where he served as the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Languages and Professor of Comparative Literature and Performance Studies. In addition, he served as Guest Artist in the Graduate Film and Television Program in the Tisch School of the Arts. He was the first professor to hold a joint appointment in the faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. In speaking about the ICWT, Ngugi has said the following:
"The Center, as its name implies, envisions conversation among languages, cultures and disciplines as key in the emerging multicultural global community. It hopes to reflect a global vision; provide a sound intellectual grounding for that vision; stimulate writing and publishing in marginalized languages; and promote translation as a means of giving visibility to genius from even the most marginalized. Given its place in the world today, English is seen as playing a different and creative role in the entire conversation: to enable and not disable.
"The International Center for Writing and Translation is therefore much more than just another academic site. It is a pioneering model for a world arising from free conversation in and among marginalized languages, and between those languages as a whole and the hitherto dominant. It is itself a vision and I feel privileged to play a part in its evolution as a site of the possible."
A two-board structure is comprised of an internal Advisory Committee of UCI faculty whose scholarly interests intersect with the Center's mission and an external Executive Board of prominent writers and scholars from the U.S. and abroad. Wole Soyinka, Nobel Laureate in Literature and Head of Literary Arts of the International Institute of Modern Letters in Las Vegas, serves ex officio on the Center Executive Board. Others who serve are former Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Mark Strand; writer and journalist Elena Poniatowska; Jacques Derrida, professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and at the University of California, Irvine; Michael Wood, Chair of the Department of English at Princeton University; Gayatri Spivak, Avalon Professor of Literature at Columbia University; poet and essayist Bei Ling; translator Dilek Dizdar of Boaziçi University and the University of Mainz; and Susan Kent, Los Angeles City Librarian.
9/10/02
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Dragan Kujundzic, Philomena
Essed,
Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Njeeri wa Ngugi,
Karen Lawrence, David Goldberg
ICWT Director,
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
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