Faculty note: Saxton-Ruiz

Gabriel T. Saxton-Ruiz, associate professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies, attended the 37th annual conference of the American Literary Translators Association last week in Milwaukee. He participated in workshops that dealt with best practices in teaching translation, how to introduce theory in the translation classroom and how to design curriculum for translation studies programs. He also gave a bilingual reading of Jorge Eduardo Benavides’ Un asunto sentimental — a novel about doomed relationships, dueling ideologies and international terrorism — and discussed the challenges of translating this piece in a presentation titled “Translating Jorge Eduardo Benavides’ A Sentimental Affair(e): Negotiating Writerly Accents.” He described how the work alternates between the perspective and narration of the author’s alter ego and that of Albert Cremades (a fictitious Catalan writer on the verge of making it big). In an attempt to recreate the competing linguistic registers (the language of a Peruvian expat who has resided in Madrid for twenty years and the Catalan-inflected Spanish of Cremades), Saxton-Ruiz’s translation had to switch between American English and British accents.