4pm, French Department lounge
Professor McCarter’s work, most recently a revelatory translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, showcases a pioneering methodology that she links to the new and growing field of “feminist translation.”
Her methodology offers an essential toolkit not just for translators, but for anyone who wants to think about language and meaning, and especially how to resist imposing modern ideas on the past or on other cultures when we translate. Professor McCarter’s strategies for feminist translation include simple guidelines that can be applied to all efforts at translation: Avoiding misogynistic/sexist/gendered language not explicit in the original; taking special care when translating the body, not introducing gendered or racialized language not in the original; calling rape rape; and avoiding basing understanding of characters’ motives on gender stereotypes that are not explicit in the text, and questioning of previous translations that have done so.
Stephanie McCarter is a Professor of Classics at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. Her books include Horace between Freedom and Slavery (University of Wisconsin Press, 2015) as well as two books of translation, Horace’s Epodes, Odes, and Carmen Saeculare (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020) and Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Penguin Classics, 2022), which won the 2023 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. She recently edited and contributed translations to Women in Power, an anthology of classical myths and stories about ruling women. She has published numerous articles in academic journals and has penned essays, translations, reviews, and interviews for The Washington Post, The Sewanee Review, Literary Hub, and elsewhere.
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