Archive of Past Events
2019
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Tuesday, November 19, 2019 On the Politics of Our Times: A Poetic Dialog with Wolfgang Hilbig, presented by Uwe Kolbe
Olin Humanities, Room 204 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm EST/GMT-5Rumor has it that dictatorship and censorship were stimulating for poetry. This event will present the poetic writings by two authors, Wolfgang Hilbig (1941–2007) and Uwe Kolbe (b. 1957), whose work began under the conditions of a closed society, whose writings contributed to this society’s opening and continued to unfold and provoke after its collapse, marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall. This public reading of both writers’ imaginative work understands itself as an invitation for a discussion on literature and politics. Uwe Kolbe is an eminent poet, essayist, writer of prose, and translator. His first volume of poetry, Hineingeboren (“Born Into”), appeared in East Berlin in 1980. The increasingly critical nature of his writing led to a ban on publication in the GDR soon after. During the early 1980s, he edited the underground journal Mikado. Eventually, he was permitted to travel abroad and lived between Hamburg and East Berlin. Kolbe is the author of 13 books of poetry and the recipient of many prestigious prizes. He also was a writer in residence at the University of Texas at Austin and at Oberlin College. His collection of essays, Vineta’s Archives (2012), received the distinguished Heinrich-Mann-Award from the Academy of Arts Berlin. Presented with generous support of the S. Fischer Foundation. |
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Thursday, October 17, 2019 Words Forever Young: Russian Avant-Garde Poetry in Translation
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4Sponsored by the Bard Translation and Translatability Initiative and Russian and Eurasian Studies, this panel explores the joys and challenges of translating Russian Avant-Garde and late Modernist poetry to English. Maria Khotimsky of MIT and Ainsley Morse of Dartmouth College address the question of translatability of Hylea and Cubo-Futurist poetry, with examples from Guro, Kruchenykh, Khlebnikov and Mayakovsky, and discuss the complexities of contemporary readers' perception and interpretation of late Mandelstam's poetry in translation. Maria Khotimsky is a Senior Lecturer in Russian and Russian Language Coordinator in the Department of Global Studies and Languages at MIT. Her recent work includes articles and conference talks on the ideology of translation in the Soviet Union, and poetics of translation in the works of several leading twentieth-century Russian poets, as well as in the work of Russian-American translingual poets. She is a co-editor of a volume of scholarly essays on the poetry and philosophy of Olga Sedakova, published in Russia (Ol’ga Sedakova: stikhi, smysly, prochteniia, NLO, 2017), and in the US (The Poetry and Poetics of Olga Sedakova. Origins, Philosophies, Points of Contention, University of Wisconsin Press, 2019). Ainsley Morse teaches in the Dartmouth College Russian department and translates Russian and former Yugoslav poetry and prose. Recent publications include Permanent Evolution, a collection of theoretical essays by the Formalist critic Yuri Tynianov (ASP; edited and translated with Philip Redko), Andrei Egunov-Nikolev's "Soviet pastoral" Beyond Tula (ASP), and, with Bela Shayevich, Kholin 66: Diaries and Poems by Igor Kholin (UDP) and Vsevolod Nekrasov’s I Live I See (UDP 2013). She is currently translating the late avant-garde novelist and poet Konstantin Vaginov and contributing to an anthology of contemporary feminist poetry. |
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Thursday, October 3, 2019 The Cultural Politics of Translation and the Nahda in Egypt
Samah Selim, Associate Professor of Arabic Language and Literature, Rutgers University Olin Humanities, Room 102 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 This talk explores the cultural geography of Cairo in the first decade of the 20th century in order to unpack and critique nahdawi representations of modernity as simulacrum. I offer a brief reading of Muhammad Al-Muwaylihi’s iconic text Hadith ʿIsa Ibn Hisham that shows how the nahda discourse on cultural authenticity masked a deep social conservatism that banished the “errant trajectories” of everyday translation practices emerging in and through the modern. Against this discourse, the talk will conclude with a discussion of adaptation as the motor of social change and cultural creativity. Samah Selim teaches at Rutgers University. She is a scholar and translator of modern Arabic literature. Her most recent book, Popular Fiction, Translation and the Nahda in Egypt, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2019. She is currently working on a translation of Jordanian author Ghalib Halasa’s final novel Sultana (1987) with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. This event is co-sponsored by the Division of Languages and Literatures, Bard Translation and Translatability Initiative, and Human Rights Project. |
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Monday, April 29, 2019 "Modernism in Translation: Poetry and Politics in Beirut's Belle Époque"
Robyn Creswell (Yale University)Olin Humanities, Room 102 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 What was the fate of literary modernism beyond Europe? Robyn Creswell's talk will explore the work of the modernist poetry movement in Beirut during the decades following WWII. By translating the techniques and ideology of modernism into Arabic, the intellectuals of Shi'r magazine radically altered the very idea of poetry in that literary tradition. This lecture will focus on the Arab modernists' exchanges with French poets, American spies, and the classical past. |
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Friday, April 26, 2019 Translation and Human Rights Symposium
RKC 103 3:00 pm – 5:30 pm EDT/GMT-4Laura Kunreuther (Bard College), “Interpreting Human Rights, Interpreting in ‘the Field’” Ziad Dallal (Bard College), “Translating Right Into Arabic: A Lexical History” Jesse Browner (United Nations), “The Role of Translation in the Establishment and Preservation of International Law” Leigh Swigart (Brandeis University), “The International Criminal Court in Translation: From Local Languages to Global Justice” Moderator: Tom Keenan (Bard College) |
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Monday, April 15, 2019 Text Unbound: (Re-)Imagining the Talmud
Multiple Locations, See Poster 11:45 am – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4Judaism is often thought of as a religion of the book, and the most influential book in the Jewish canon is the Talmud—a famously complex, genre-defying text that has been at the center of Jewish life and learning since the Middle Ages. Nowadays, the Talmud is most often encountered in book form, typically in large tomes whose pages are imprinted with an iconic, typeset design. And yet the Talmud is considered to be the culmination of Judaism’s Oral Torah, and it was produced and originally transmitted orally by rabbis living in late antique Iraq. This workshop will gather scholars, artists, a printer, a digitalist, and a performer to consider the many manifestations of this classical work and related Jewish textualities, from late antique graffiti and lament; to contemporary fiction, illustration, and printing; to the virtual universes of digitization and the internet, and experimental voice art. These explorations bear relevance not only for Jewish Studies, but also for broader matters such as the study of writing and orality, and the future of the book in the digital age. Participants Zachary Braiterman is professor of religion in the Department of Religion at Syracuse University. Jessica Tamar Deutsch is a New York based artist. In 2017, she published The Illustrated Pirkei Avot: A Graphic Novel of Jewish Ethics. Victoria Hanna is a Jerusalem based composer, creator, performer, researcher, and teacher of voice and language. Galit Hasan-Rokem is a poet, translator, and Grunwald Professor of Folklore and Professor of Hebrew Literature (emerita) at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Scott-Martin Kosofsky is an award-winning printer, book designer, and typography expert based in Rhinebeck. Ruby Namdar is an Israeli novelist based in New York City. His novel The Ruined House (Harper, 2018) won the Sapir Prize, Israel’s most prestigious prize in Hebrew literature. Jonathan Rosen is a writer and essayist, and wrote The Talmud and the Internet (Picador, 2000). He is the editorial director of Nextbook Press. Karen B. Stern is associate professor of history at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. Shai Secunda holds the Jacob Neusner chair in Jewish Studies at Bard College. Sara Tillinger Wolkenfeld is the director of education at Sefaria.org. |
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Thursday, April 11, 2019 Poet & Translator:
by Paolo Valesio, with Translator Todd PortnowitzA Bilingual Reading from Midnight in Spoleto Olin Humanities, Room 102 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Italian poet and scholar Paolo Valesio and his translator Todd Portnowitz read from their recent publication, Midnight in Spoleto (Fomite, 2018), and discuss the intricacies of the translation process. PAOLO VALESIO is the author, among several other works, of twenty books of poetry and is the Giuseppe Ungaretti Professor Emeritus in Italian Literature at Columbia University. He was the founder, and coordinator for ten years, of the “Yale Poetry Group” at Yale University, and the founder and director of the journal Yale Italian Poetry (YIP), whose successor is the Italian Poetry Review (IPR) a “plurilingual journal of creativity and criticism” based in New York and in Florence, Italy—of which Valesio is the editor in chief; he is also the President of the “Centro Studi Sara Valesio” in Bologna. TODD PORTNOWITZ is the translator of Midnight in Spoleto by Paolo Valesio (Fomite, 2018) and of Long Live Latin by Nicola Gardini, forthcoming in October from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and is a recipient of the Raiziss/de Palchi Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. An assistant editor with Alfred A. Knopf, he is a co-founder of the Italian poetry journal Formavera and of the Brooklyn-based reading series for writer-translators, Us&Them. |
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Tuesday, March 12, 2019 What Poetry Does in Contemporary Japan: Translating, Publishing, and Writing between Languages
Dr. Jordan Smith, Josai International UniversityOlin Humanities, Room 205 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 Japanese poetry is often associated with traditional verse (haiku, tanka) and Zen Buddhism. Japan today is understood in vastly different ways—famed as much for the sophisticated metropolitan capital and anime as it is for its traditional and natural beauty. The “translationscape” of Japanese poetry reveals massive gaps between the texts and authors that reach Western languages and the vivacious, roiling, even overwhelming world of Japanese poetry today. Contemporary poetry, in its many (and competing) forms, plays a vital role of resistance in a nation where discourses of economic stagnation threaten to define an era. Poetry practitioners treat their arts (writing and performing) with reverence while fully utilizing all arts and media available. Drawing on his experience editing the Tokyo Poetry Journal, building bridges between anglophone and Japanese poetry worlds, writing bilingual poetry, and translating luminaries in the making, Prof. Smith’s talk blends ethnography of the contemporary world of Japanese poetry with readings of poems by the current cutting edges—tracing their jagged contours and trajectories into and outside of various spaces of poetry. Jordan A. Y. Smith writes poetry and comic theater and has translated poetry by Yoshimasu Gozo (for Poetry Review, Tokyo Poetry Journal), Mizuta Noriko (The Road Home 2015; Sea of Blue Algae, 2016), Nomura Kiwao, Misumi Mizuki, Fuzuki Yumi, and Usami Kohji, and prose fiction from Alberto Fuguet and Fernando Iwasaki. He is currently an associate professor in international humanities at Josai International University, and has previously taught comparative literature, Japanese studies, literary translation, and English at California State University Long Beach, UCLA, Roger Williams University, UC Riverside, Pepperdine University, and Korea University. |
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Thursday, February 7, 2019 Babel of the Atlantic: Language and Translatability in the Politics of Migration, Settler Colonialism, and Political Resistance
Dr. Bethany Wiggin, University of PennsylvaniaOlin Humanities, Room 102 4:45 pm – 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5 In dialogue with oceanic history and the “blue humanities,” this talk considers the role of language (languages) and translatability in the politics of migration, settler colonialism, and political resistance, drawing on archives and case studies from the colonial American mid-Atlantic region. The area was known as the “Babel of the Atlantic” in a variety of European languages, and the textual archives of the mid-Atlantic’s manuscript and print cultures continue to offer rich sites to explore the role of language and colonial as well as anti-colonial politics. Individual cultural brokers, including translators, have been the subject of rich recent historical scholarship while often subject to their contemporaries’ curiosity and sometimes their suspicion. How might we build on these accounts of individual translators to explore the multilingualism of the archives more broadly? What research methods and collaborations might we need to make their polyglot and heterodox voices audible today? And, how might a historically rich account of Atlantic multilingualism resound today under widespread pressure on humanistic ways of knowing? |
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Tuesday, February 5, 2019 Poetry and Classical Myth: A Reading and Discussion
by Poet/Translator A. E. StallingsCampus Center, Weis Cinema 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5 A. E. Stallings is an American poet who studied classics at the University of Georgia and Oxford. She has published three collections of poetry—Archaic Smile, Hapax, and Olives—and a verse translation (in rhyming fourteeners!) of Lucretius, The Nature of Things. She has received a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and fellowships from United States Artists, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. She is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Stallings speaks and lectures widely on a variety of topics, and has been a regular faculty member at the West Chester Poetry Conference and the Sewanee Summer Writers’ Conference. Having studied in Athens, Georgia, she now lives in Athens, Greece, with her husband, the journalist John Psaropoulos, and their two argonauts, Jason and Atalanta. |