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CORVALLIS, Ore. - The fourth lecture in the 2009-10 Horning Lecture Series, "Translation: Crossing Borders, Crossing Cultures," will be given by Burton Pike of the City University of New York on Thursday, May 13, at Oregon State University.

The free public lecture begins at 4 p.m. in the Memorial Union Journey Room at OSU. Pike's talk, "The Future of Translation," will focus on literary translation - a complex activity that has been dependent on changes in culture and language.

Over the past century, these changes have been accelerating - the notion of national literature has faded, and writing has become increasingly international and to some extent increasingly local, bypassing in both directions the notion of "nation." These new forms of writing and reading are calling into question attitudes toward translation as a bridge between cultures and toward translators as professional mediators between cultures.

Pike is an emeritus professor of comparative literature and German at City University. He has had a Guggenheim Fellowship and in 1992 was awarded the Medal of Merit by the city of Klagenfurt, Austria, for his work on Austrian modernist writer Robert Musil.

Pike wrote the first critical study of Musil (Cornell, 1961) and has edited and co-translated a number of his works. He also translated and wrote the introduction to Goethe's novel "The Sorrows of Young Werther" (Random House/Modern Library, 2004) and translated and wrote the introduction to Rilke's novel "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge" (Dalkey Archive Press, 2008).

The Horning Lecture Series is supported by the Horning Endowment in the Humanities. For more information, contact the History Department at 541-737-8560 or visit www.oregonstate.edu/cla/history