LATROBE, PA – Eulalia Books, an independent publisher of international poetry in translation housed at Saint Vincent College, will present “The Poetics of Translation, a four-part virtual series featuring several Eulalia Books translators who will recontextualize the innovative strategies of translation for poets and writers.
Co-organized by Michelle Gil-Montero, professor of English and publisher of Eulalia Books, and Mallory Truckenmiller-Saylor, C’19, a second-year graduate student in the prestigious University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the series of presentations will be held in lieu of the traditional Saint Vincent College Visiting Writers Series.
The series will offer a mix of readings, presentations, Q&A sessions and writing workshops. The series is free and open to the public, with no translation or foreign language experience necessary.
Online registration for each session is available at https://www.eventbrite.com/d/online/eulalia-books/.
The schedule is as follows:
Sunday, Sept. 20 – 4 p.m.
“Your Word Against Mine”: The Generative Role of Friction in Translation
Presented by Truckenmiller-Saylor, the first installment of “The Poetics of Translation” will feature a short presentation on feminist writer Nicole Brossard’s The Mauve Desert and Barbara Godard’s essay on the novel “Translating Ang(l)es: Or, the Difference ‘L’ Makes,” followed by a writing workshop that will name, explore and offer a writing technique based on the creative power of slippage and friction in translation. Participants are asked to bring a poem or short prose piece (their own or that of another) to use for the writing prompt.
Sunday, Sept. 27 – 4 p.m.
Re-writing the Text: Defamiliarization in Katabasis
The second installment of “The Poetics of Translation” will be led by Olivia Lott, an award-winning writer and translator and doctoral student in the Hispanic Studies program at Washington University – St. Louis. Lott will read from her translation of Lucía Estrada’s Katabasis and lead a workshop which will approach translation and writing through the lens of defamiliarization by presenting a discussion that provides strategies to deform or re-formulate a text through an exploration of its latent components.
Sunday, Oct. 25 – 4 p.m.
Translating the Margins: Linguistic Defiance in Night in the North
The third session will be led by Laura Cesarco Eglin and Jesse Lee Kercheval, who will open by reading from their translation of Fabîan Severo’s Night in the North, a text written in Portuñol and not in the dominant Spanish of Uruguay. The translators will then participate in a Q&A on their translation of the text and this marginalized language. Attendees will then engage with a writing prompt that responds to the linguistic rebellion of Severo’s texts.
Sunday, Nov. 15 – 4 p.m.
Making Another: On Retranslations
The final session in “The Poetics of Translation” will feature renowned poet and translator Erín Moure, who will read from her work Sleepless Nights Under Capitalism, a translation of poems by Juan Gelman. The reading will lead into a discussion on re-translating and the delighting in the interpretive possibilities of a text, before the session closes with a Q&A with Moure.
For more information, on “The Poetics of Translation,” contact Gil-Montero at michelle.gil-montero@stvincent.edu.
Eulalia Books is affiliated with Saint Vincent College’s literary translation program, a conjunctive effort of the English and Modern and Classical Language departments. Staffed by a number of Saint Vincent College students and faculty, its mission is to publish modern and contemporary poets who do not yet have a collection translated into English.
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