English 9BV adds a skill that the other three semesters do not have: reading in translation. Most of the course’s literature was not written in English, and the course is built on the premise that a translator is an author. That premise changes how students read every line.

You do not need Sanskrit or Classical Chinese to teach it. The course does not ask anyone to judge a translation against the original. It asks students to notice that a translation is a set of choices, and it makes those choices visible in the only way a non-specialist can see them: by putting two English versions side by side.

There are three such pairings in the course, and they are deliberate.

Kālidāsa in Ryder (1912), with Monier-Williams for comparison. Shakuntala is read in Arthur Ryder’s translation, which renders the play’s verse passages as rhymed English verse and its prose as prose. Lesson 1.4 asks for one comparison against Monier-Williams’s earlier Victorian version on a passage the student’s own claim depends on. The difference in diction is large and audible, and it teaches students that the “feel” of a line they are analyzing may belong to 1912 rather than to the fifth century.

Pound and Waley. Ezra Pound’s Cathay (1915) and Arthur Waley’s A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (1918) appeared three years apart and draw on the same classical tradition. Pound’s book is mostly Li Bai; Waley’s leans on Bai Juyi. Where they overlap — for example the Han-dynasty poem Pound titled “The Beautiful Toilet” — the two sound nothing alike. Check the pairing you plan to use against both books before the lesson. Pound worked from another scholar’s notes and made spare, imagist English; Waley worked from the Chinese and wrote plainer, more literal lines. Setting them together is the single most effective translation lesson available, because students can hear two people deciding.

Tagore and Gandhi in their own English. Tagore translated Gitanjali himself, and Gandhi translated Hind Swaraj himself. Both cut, compressed and rewrote as they went. A self-translation is a second original, not a copy, and students should cite it as the author’s English.

Three rules to hold students to. Always name the translator in citations and in sentences: “Kālidāsa, in Ryder’s translation, has the king…”. Never build a claim on a single word of a translated text without saying whose word it is. And when a claim depends heavily on diction, check the second translation if one exists. A claim that survives in both versions is about the author; a claim that survives in only one is about the translator, which is also a legitimate claim if the student says so.

Why it matters for the standards. RL.9-10.6 in this band asks for literature from outside the United States, and in practice that means literature in translation. A student who can distinguish author from translator has met that standard in its full sense rather than as a reading-list checkbox.