Kavya Workshop - Latse Library - 2017

Skills for Translators

The study of Kavya will not only enhance one's appreciation for Tibetan writing styles and literature in general but is also a useful tool for translators to develop. Knowledge of how Kavya is used in Tibetan writing will help a translator to interpret and understand sections of texts that include poetry and song, and other writing based on the Kavya style, that we often find inserted into sections of text common in nearly every Tibetan genre, such as introductions, opening and closing prayers, dedications, and colophons.

Kavyadarsha at the Latse Library in New York

Latse Library in New York hosted a workshop on Tseten Zhabdrung’s commentary on poetics May 12-14, 2017. Kurtis Schaeffer and Andy Quintman organized the meeting with Gendun Rabsel, Nicole Willock, Janet Gyatso, Pema Bum, and a small group of specialists (attendees listed below).

Organizers

Gendun Rabsel, Indiana University

In the current political circumstances, Tibetan literature and language is in grave danger of surviving. My life goal is to contribute to preserving and promoting the advancement and flourishing of Tibetan literature and language. With these concepts in mind, I have chosen to devote my career to teaching, writing, researching and translating so that Tibetan language can flourish in today’s world.

Nicole Willock, Old Dominion University

Nicole Willock (Ph.D. Indiana University in Tibetan Studies and Religious Studies, 2011) is an assistant professor at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA. She is 2017 Research Fellow, The Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Program in Buddhist Studies, administered by the American Council of Learned Societies for her book project: Lineages of the Literary: Tibetan Buddhists Making Modern China. She is currently polishing up A Tibetan-English Primer for Poetics (Snyan ngag leg deb bod yin shan sbyar), which is co-authored by Gendun Rabsal. She also co-translated “Zhangtön Tenpa Gyatso’s Advice a Jeweled Rosary” with Gendun Rabsal, which will appear in Buddhist Luminaries: Inspired Advice by Nineteenth-Century Ecumenical Masters in Eastern Tibet, edited by Holly Gayley and Joshua Schapiro (Boston: Wisdom Publications, expected in 2017).

Andrew Quintman, Yale University

Andrew Quintman is associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Yale University, specializing in the Buddhist traditions of Tibet and the Himalaya. For seven years he served as the academic director of the School for International Training’s Tibetan Studies program based in Kathmandu. He is the author of The Yogin and the Madman: Reading the Biographical Corpus of the Great Tibetan Saint Milarepa (Columbia University Press 2014). His English translation of The Life of Milarepa (2010) was published in the Penguin Classics series. He is currently writing a history of Drakar Taso Monastery in Tibet southern borderland and a study of the Buddha’s life story through the visual and literary materials of Jonang Monastery in western Tibet.

Kurtis Schaeffer, University of Virginia

Kurtis R. Schaeffer received an M.A. in Buddhist Studies from the University of Washington in 1995, a Ph.D. in Tibetan and South Asian Religions from Harvard in 2000 and is now an associate professor of Tibetan and Buddhist Studies at the University of Virginia. His books include Sources of Tibetan Tradition (2013), The Tibetan History Reader (2013), The Culture of the Book in Tibet (2009), An Early Tibetan Catalogue of Buddhist Literature (2009), Dreaming the Great Brahmin, and Himalayan Hermitess (2004).

Janet Gyatso, Harvard University

Janet Gyatso (BA, MA, PhD, University of California at Berkeley) is a specialist in Buddhist studies with concentration on Tibetan and South Asian cultural and intellectual history. Her books include Apparitions of the Self: The Secret Autobiographies of a Tibetan Visionary; In the Mirror of Memory: Reflections on Mindfulness and Remembrance in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism; and Women of Tibet. She has recently completed a new book, Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet, which focuses upon alternative early modernities and the conjunctions and disjunctures between religious and scientific epistemologies in Tibetan medicine in the sixteenth–eighteenth centuries

Attendees

• José I. Cabezón, Universtiy of California, Santa Barbara
• Jann Ronis, Universtiy of California, Berkeley
• Holly Gayley, University of Colorado, Boulder

Opening Remarks

A Welcome from Drupgyu Anthony Chapman, Vice President of Tsadra Foundation.

Kavya in Tibet Translator's Craft Session

Translator’s Craft Session 1.1 • Room 207, 2nd Floor • 2:30 PM, June 2, 2017

with Gendun Rabsel, Nicole Willock, Andrew Quintman, Kurtis R. Schaeffer

Kavya in Tibet is a session following from a workshop on Tseten Zhabdrung’s commentary on poetics (Snyan ngag spyi don) that was hosted at the Latse Library with Gendun Rabsel, Nicole Willock, Andy Quintman, and Kurtis Schaeffer. The Tibetan system of poetics and ornate poetry is highly influential in the history of Tibetan writing and is based on the most important Indian manual of poetics, Daṇḍin’s Mirror of Poetics (Kāvyādarśa). This session will introduce some of the fundamental theory and practice of this type of literature.

• File:Kavya Workshop Slides from 2017 Translation and Transmission Conference

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