TODAY at Princeton

Apr 7, 2025, 12:00 pm – 1:20 pm

Louis A. Simpson International Building, Room 144 

Begin with a poetics of comics: when does less make for more in a speech balloon? Can enjambment enliven a caption? Is translating comics translating typography? Surprising kinships surface in discourses for these two fields — virtuous invisibility and transparency. And what of onomatopoeia? The word-object incarnate, for which shape and sound supersede semantics, challenges translators to think visually as letterers, aurally as poets, and holistically as designers, taking them down to the atomic, syllabic level. Finally, this survey of serendipities, inspirations, constraints, and frustrations drawn from twenty years in the trenches takes a step back from textual questions to consider how comics’ unique position in contemporary publishing raises issues of reception relevant to all translation.