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January 2018: Alexander Ullman is a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley. He studies 20th-century literature.
Despite the output of scholarship in the field of sound studies over the past three decades, relatively little work has been done on sound and translation. By engaging the translation theories of Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, and Naomi Seidman, this essay takes an interdisciplinary approach in arguing that sound functions as a productive obstacle in translation. The essay situates sound within current frameworks of translation theory, considers the role of sound in late modernist experimental works that use translation as a generative mode of literary composition, and surveys the performative aspects of sound in contemporary translations of liturgical Hebrew poetry known as piyutim.
