Translating the Cantigas — an impossible task?
Translating the Cantigas — an impossible task?
College of Arts School of Modern Languages and Cultures
Date: Monday 24 October 2022
Time: 14:00 - 15:00
Venue: Sir Alexander Stone Building, room 204
Category: Student events, Staff workshops and seminars
Speaker: Richard Zenith
Document: Poster Zenith Translation Workshop
The Galician-Portuguese cantigas (songs), dating back to the 13th-century, provide a fascinating
window into love, morality, politics, and religiosity in medieval Iberia. They are notoriously difficult to
translate. Richard Zenith, who published 113 Galician-Portuguese Troubadour Poems: a Bilingual
Anthology in 1995, has just brought out a deeply revised and somewhat expanded anthology titled
Cantigas: Galician-Portuguese Troubadour Poems. He will read a few of his translations and discuss
what makes these poems so fascinating as well as why they’re so challenging to render into English.
To reserve your place go to www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/443999864547
This event would be particularly interesting to postgraduates and colleagues working in Translation Studies.