heliogabalus

A piece of potential advice about letters of recommendation--if the recommender is having a difficult time producing a rec, offer to write up your own letter of rec and send it to the professor to accept, adapt, or decline as she sees fit. A good letter of recommendation takes a ton of time to write--these professors know that. They may be swamped and can't find the time to do you justice or they may not regard you as highly as you think. Whatever the case, if you need to get a rec in and it's getting tight, offer to do the heavy-lifting yourself.

PDH where is your translation degree from, Iowa, Arkansas, Queens?

Northwestern doesn't require the GRE?? Weird, but my guess is that GRE English scores were hurting good candidates from Russia, so they dropped them. For Modern Russian lit, Northwestern has had a pretty strong rep. Be wary of anyone who tells you that the faculty will be aging out. The professors will definitely be retiring, but those tenured positions will rarely turn into new tenure track positions. Just look at Penn: 3 professors, 7 lecturers. When Steiner retired, they just closed up the position, I think. I don't mean to be a complete downer, but compared to the number of academic jobs that open, there is a plethora of Slavic PhDs. Figure that every Slavic Department is putting out 1-2 PhDs per year; so you have about 25 PhDs per year. Of those 25, maybe 3 get decent academic jobs (if there are others, count on some senior professors to move). Next year when there are three more jobs, you will have the 22 PhDs left over from last year competing for the 3 jobs that the new 25 PhDs are competing for. The good news is that being a Slavic PhD does give you some unique talents that an English PhD won't, so you'll have some other opportunities--but I think within academia Slavics is as depressing as any other field in the humanities. (And of the schools on your list, only Harvard will really give you a better chance at getting one of the academic jobs.)

I've heard better things about Bloomington than Urbana as a city--but if the program looks better, that's great. I feel like Indiana is trying to expand more into other languages so Russian, which I think is cool, but if you're strictly a 19th-20th cent. Russianist a place like Northwestern could be good. What happened to UChicago? It seems like the place imploded or something. Do you want to go into academia or alt-ac?

Indiana seems to have been bolstering the translation side of their program in the last few years.

You might want to look into musical theater MFAs. From my limited experience, MFAs seem to concentrate on more popular contemporary poetry that eschew the vowel-rhymes that work well in lyrics.

My take might be a bit blunt: Rewrite the paper so you can figure out how to write a good one--you'll need to know how, and her saying it's "vague and unoriginal" along with general recommendations on how to write a paper suggest that you may have trouble with longer essays. That said, it is August, i.e. summer; the last thing your professors want to be doing right now is reading student essays. Look at her comments, rewrite the essay following her suggestions, and then take it to her once school starts back up.

At the end of the day, you are spending time in a graduate program (with awful employment prospects in the field) because you enjoy discussing and working with Rhetoric and Composition. I just don't think that is any different than spending time in a graduate creative writing program because a student would like to spend time discussing and working on writing (with awful prospects of becoming a published writer able live off their writing profits). It is the same thing. And since all (9 or so) American creative writing PhDs fund, so that's not any different than a comp/rhet PhD. The top MFAs fund very well (Michener, Michigan, JHU, etc.), better than any other English MA. And I would imagine that funding for creative writing MAs and MFAs is not far less common than with comp/rhet MAs. Do you have any direct experience with MFAs? I do, and am reluctant to champion them, but I don't think they are so guilty of the ills you accuse them of spreading.

I'm getting really confused: So "it's snobbish and unfair because not everyone is in a position to go to graduate school and either go into debt, or live in poverty for 2-3 years in order to get a degree," when that degree is in creative writing, but to do that for 6-10 years for a degree in English or Comp-Rhet is sound because it's playing the game to get the career you want? (Although, very few actually get that career, and instead end up adjuncting with worse salaries and benefits than the custodians that clean the classrooms.) You can be a writer without an MFA, that's not going to change--ever. It's just harder to teach creative writing at a university without one (or more commonly without an MFA and a PhD), just like you can write scholarly works without a PhD or working in academia, it just makes it harder to get a job with benefits. (Although James Wood seems to be doing ok with what is basically an undergraduate degree.)

Why would someone go for an MFA? Well, if it's funded, that means a few years of not having to work a job and have writing as something you do after work. That doesn't mean someone in an MFA program will be a better writer, but it's not a bad thing. And while there are cash cow programs (Columbia, etc.) some offer good funding. I did an MFA in translation. While I was translating before, and have been translating since, some good came out of attending. Mainly, it came out of the creative writing program's poetry classes--it's a very different thing to study poetry with a poet than it is to study with someone whose main interest is how Judith Butler would read it. Having taken those classes, I know I'm a much better teacher and translator of poetry. I was in a traditional lit PhD for awhile and I did like that the MFA classes and professors seemed more interested in how something is written and how effects are achieved--something I imagine comp/rhet people would like too. I'm going to be a jerk about this, and I'm sorry. Criticisms of MFA programs are certainly valid, but it's funny when that criticism is coming out of a rhet/comp MA program. I love teaching writing, so I would be interesting in rhetoric and composition programs, and MA rhet/comp programs that fund--excellent! (Well funded PhD program, even better.) But glancing at the website of Carnegie Mellon (one of the biggies in the field, right?), it doesn't seem that they offer any sort of funding for MAs. They give a bit of a tuition break. So basically an MA student at CMU and other places that don't fund would be paying so that they could teach the remedialish comp classes that tenured professors would rather eat cobwebs than teach. (Much better to teach composition to grad students who are fascinated about the subject than freshmen, right?) You could complain that MFAs are professionalizing artistry (I would still disagree that creative writing is more spontaneous than critcism--seems like a very Romantic idea), but you could also argue that rhet/comp MA students are deprofessionalizing writing instruction, since freshmen are no longer being taught by professors and PhDs. Creative writing programs at some schools are cash cows, but how much money do universities make by farming out freshmen writing classes to new grad students instead of hiring more professors? I'm not actually against rhet/comp programs or rhet/comp ma programs. I just think it's funny for people in one exploitative program that offers unrealistic hope to scoff at those in another.

Naffster, which Czech university did you study at? For anyone who knows it, Charles University will have a great reputation. In my experience, the students graduating from Charles University in English are actually (far) more knowledgeable than students graduating from US programs. If you're graduating from Charles University, I wouldn't aim strictly at mid-tier. Maybe check out which programs your professors are connected with--through visiting professorships, etc.--so that the schools likely know of the university. Also, it might be worth mentioning in your statement of purpose that it was great to study at the university that produced Wellek and Mukarovsky. I know that Palackeho and Masarykova have good reputations as well, but they will probably not have the cachet that Charles has.

The only way this could be worse would be if the stationary were actually the student essays you had to judge.

That's a good school, and if you applied to it, there's probably a good reason. You might want to think of going there and once you fulfill the MA requirements, see if you want to stay there or switch out,

One good thing about getting an MA--or spending any time in a graduate program--is that your writing should improve quite a bit. Perhaps you are already a phenomenal writer who knows how to seamlessly incorporate evidence into complex ideas, turning opaque concepts into clear prose--but I wasn't. By the end, though, I was pretty good. Regardless of whether someone will offer you more money because you have an MA or not, being a good writer will be valued in most workplaces and can help with advancement. That said, spending lots of time on Theory for your PhD could possibly ruin your writing, so that might be worth thinking about too. (I'm joking--well, half-way.)

When you say 'free' do you mean that you get a stipend as well, or just that you don't have to pay for the school? If you've gotten admitted with funding, you could stay in the program until you qualify for the MA--usually 1-2 years--using that time to apply for jobs that are interesting, and bail out with the MA and hopefully a good job offer. I'm sure some people will disagree with me on this, but I certainly had more time on my hands in grad school than I do working--I think it's a good time to also indulge in side projects that you are interested in and which could lead to employment outside academia (if you don't want to be a professor).

What does the Fellowship cover? (Usually fellowships mean you don't have to teach and your tuition is covered.) The six workshops--is that six in total for the year, or 3 semester-classes each semester of your second year? This sounds pretty awful, though. I would reapply. An MFA is not something you should go into debt for--it's only real value is that it gives you some time to work on your writing, and it sounds like you might not be getting too much of that at the place in CA.

I'm sure this is true, but the admissions rates only really tell you whether more or fewer people get in--it would only be harder to get in if the applicants that are getting accepted to Harvard are getting denied by BU.

I think the key to this one is write the hell out of your cover letter--in the prep schools I've taught at, we would get tons of resumes for openings, and often the PhDs would just kind of get handed to us through a placement service or emailed in with only the most superficial attempt at persuading us that they really wanted to teach high school or middle school. Next, be careful about applying for prep school positions in areas where there are lots of big universities around. In NYC, I feel like we would get half the PhDs from Columbia and NYU applying for a spot.

Is there anywhere--besides maybe Kentucky--that doesn't do this???

Sorry to go on and on... it's just this is one of the rare occasions to dive into my big interests--classics and translation. And thanks, Agrippina, for challenging me on this. With fidelity and beauty--Yevtushenko made the great, albeit sexist, quote that translations are like women: either beautiful or faithful. I'm not convinced that they are exclusive---either with translations or people--but here goes playing with the concepts: From Horace's Ode 1.23: Atqui non ego te, tigris ut asperaGaetulusue leo, frangere persequor:tandem desine matremtempestiva sequi viro. A very literal/faithful translation would be: However, I do not, like the rough tigress or Gaetulian lion, pursue you to crush (you): finally leave your mother, (you're) mature enough to follow a man. It's accurate, but horrible as a piece of poetry. A bit less literal--but attempting to keep something like the 4th Asclepiadean meter. Yet I’m not the tigress growling so cruelly, some Gaetulian lion ready to pounce on you. Time you break away from mom, girl, you’re ready to chase a man. Less faithful to the vocab and the meter, instead substituting a kind of variation of a balladic structure. No, I’m no tigress on the prowl, no lion stalking you like prey. It’s time to leave your mom, When you’re ripe for a man. I think, or at least hope, that all the versions are clearly translations of the original stanza, but they are different. I view it as listening to different contemporary orchestras playing "eine kliene nachtmusik"--they will all be different, yet will still clearly be Mozart.

Ha. Depending on context, all of those could work in a translation. 1. "Mars fell in love with the girl" could work just fine, especially if the amat is a historical present. Also, if the sentence is part of a poetic verse, "Mars fell in love with the girl" may work better with the meter the translator is using. 2. "Mars thought the girl was hot," if switching tenses isn't an issue, might be fun to use if you found it in a poem by Sulpicia and want to highlight that it's by a teenage girl or are publishing for an audience of 15-year-olds. That depends on what the purpose of the translation is--if it is to help upper division Latin students understand what is being said, absolutely. If it is to communicate the effect and beauty and meaning of the original--and most people translating Latin and Greek know the languages incredibly well--then a scholarly, slavish approach can be less than ideal. And it does. But think about poetry. If you're translating Horace, in a class where your sight-translation is being used to test your understanding of Latin grammar, translating a future-less-vivid conditional as "should, would" is something you want to nail to show you understand the construction and how it has been traditionally conveyed in English by grammarians. If you are trying to translate the poem as poetry, it becomes less important because to do so you might have to sacrifice the sound or the meter or the power or effect. (Gotta run, but I'll come up with an example later.)

It would only be a derivative work if you really change the text and try not to serve the original author--for adaptations, I'm thinking something like Brandon Brown's The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus. When I say fidelity, I guess I mean a slavish devotion to the meaning of every word in a Classical text--and I think that's what most classics' students and scholars think, but I feel it is changing. Walter Benjamin says that the ideal translation is an interlinear gloss--great if you're learning a language; awful if you want to read a beautiful translation; Nabokov's ideal was something more along the lines of google translating a text. But if you're trying to carry over the effect of a literary text, you often have to pay attention to things other than simple 1-to-1 meaning. For example, I think Sarah Ruden is the only person who ever tried to capture Apuleius' alliteration in English. Is it a good translation if the meaning is essentially the same, but the writing misses out on the sound-play that makes Apuleius so different from other Roman writers? Or what about the translations of the Iliad--Lattimore is probably the most faithful, and my favorite, but does that mean that the liberties taken by Lombardo to make it more colloquial mean that it is no longer a translation? (And as Sacklunch points out, even when you prefer one translation over another, you have to think about your audience. I would choose Lombardo over Lattimore if I were teaching 14-year-olds.) You shouldn't just make stuff up, but for good translators--and I think it's changing but I don't think most 20th century translators of Latin and Greek were all that phenomenal (they tended to be scholars rather than writers)--a major concern is 'how does this sound in English'?

Since most translations of Classical texts are of literary texts, then accuracy and efficiency are probably not the most important goals. At least they aren't to me or the other translators I know. Power and beauty are as important as fidelity.

Oh, and on the matter of translations--original texts are static, but since language constantly changes then new translations are always welcome and interesting. Each translation will carry different interpretations and readings (as well as appealing to different audiences) so they are always worth doing. The only real issue in my mind is figuring out which works to translate--would it be better to spend your time translating the Chronica Boemorum into English since nobody has (well finally one person did) instead of Tacitus?

Sure, but I'm fine with this--Since at least the Renaissance (if you don't want to start with Ancient Rome), Western Culture has been privileging Roman and Greek culture (or what they imagine those cultures to be) over all others. It may be unfair that Mayan or Bantu or Norse culture has had less of a cultural impact on the West, but that's how it is. (Personally, I study a tiny culture very few people are interested in.) I don't mind that Oxford calls Latin and Greek "the greats," when Chinese culture is pretty great too. It makes sense in context. And I am sorry I was being rude--it just seems to me like going to a Native American studies conference and pointing out to Leslie Marmon Silko that when she mentions "our ancestors" those ancestors probably don't include me, since I'm not a Pueblo Indian. Again--context.