Jennifer Grotz – Afterlives (January 2022)

This lecture will argue that the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel is more than an origin myth on the curious plurality of human languages but also a concept or principle that points not only to myriad opportunities and resources for writers in terms of our medium (language) but also to how our works endure and evolve over time, be it through allusion, translation, adaptation, or what Walter Benjamin called in “The Task of the Translator,” an artwork’s “afterlife.” We will start small, even granular, looking for evidence of the Tower of Babel in language, even in individual words, and then we will consider the case study of a Yiddish folk song with an extraordinary and exemplary set of afterlives.