Episode 6: How Language Becomes Literature

In this episode, Ivars Šteinbergs—a graduate student in the Comparative Literature Department at Binghamton—tells us his thoughts on how the use of language (word-play, metaphor, etc.) become literature. He reads us his own translations of Latvian poet, Imants Ziedonis, and explains how modern poetry that has been influenced by classic literature/ancient texts allows students to access the classics in a different way. He gives us an example of this process by reading an excerpt of The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You by Frank Stanford that he assigned with passages about the last supper in the Bible