Archive of Past Events
2020
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Thursday, November 12, 2020 Poetry, Translation, and the Circulation of Global Modernism: A Roundtable and Reading
Moderated by Alys Moody and Stephen Rosswith Emily Drumsta, Klara Du Plessis, Ariel Resnikoff, and Sho Sugita Online Event 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm EST/GMT-5 To receive the Zoom invitation for this event, please email [email protected]. Invitations will be sent out on the morning of the event. Global modernism exists only in translation. Its condition of possibility is the circulation of texts through time and space, across languages and in languages that are not the texts’ own. Historically speaking, the texts we think of as modernist are, almost without exception, the products of lively eras of translation in an expanded sense that reaches beyond the strict remit of textual translation between languages. In order to have global modernism, then, there must be translation and, necessarily, its distortions. Global modernism, by foregrounding this established problematic of translation in the context of an awareness of the unevenness of global exchange, highlights the centrality of language politics to modernist literary creation. The study of global modernism, too, relies on active and continuous translation efforts. Contemporary translators, many of them themselves practicing poets or writers, are increasingly making available modernisms from around the world. In doing so, they underscore the extent to which modernists so often regarded translation as a primary creative act rather than secondary or derivative one. This roundtable and reading features the work of four scholars and translators of modernist poetry who contributed original translations to the anthology Global Modernists on Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2020) and whose efforts shine illuminating cross-lights on the modernist labour of translation. As several of our participants are also practicing multilingual poets, the event will offer an occasion to listen to and reflect on the contemporary legacies of modernist poetics. This conversation, held under the shared auspices of the Literature Program at Bard College and Concordia University’s Centre for Expanded Poetics, is the second in a three-part series exploring global modernism, in celebration of the anthology. It was preceded by a roundtable on “Editing Global Modernism,” held on October 23, and will be followed by a workshop on pedagogy and global modernism on Friday, December 4, 1:30–4:30pm EST. Speakers Emily Drumsta is an assistant professor of comparative literature at Brown University, where she works on modern Arabic and Francophone literatures. Her translation, Revolt Against the Sun: A Bilingual Reader of Nazik al-Mala'ika's Poetry was awarded a PEN/Heim Grant in 2018 and is forthcoming with Saqi Books in January 2021. She is a cofounder of Tahrir Documents, an online archive of newspapers, broadsides, pamphlets, and other ephemera collected in Cairo’s Tahrir Square during the 2011 Egyptian uprisings. Her translations have been published in McSweeney's, Asymptote, Jadaliyya, Circumference, and the Trinity Journal of Literary Translation. Emily contributed translations of Nazik al-Mala’ika’s critical writing to the anthology’s section on Modernism in the Arab World. Klara Du Plessis is a second-year, FRQSC-funded PhD student in English literature at Concordia University, focusing on contemporary, Canadian poetry and the curation of literary events. As part of her dissertation preparation, she is pursuing a practical, experimental research creation component called Deep Curation, which approaches the organization of literary events as directed by the curator and places poets’ work in deliberate dialogue with each another, heightening the curator’s agency toward the poetic product; to date, she has curated eight such poetry readings, most recently with Sawako Nakayasu, Lee Ann Brown, and Fanny Howe at Boston University, in January 2020. Klara is also deeply involved with SpokenWeb, acting both as a researcher and as the student representative of its governing board; SpokenWeb is a SSHRC-funded, multi-institutional research project, founded at Concordia, that digitizes and archives poetry readings from the past seventy years in North America. Parallel to her scholarly activities, Klara is a poet and critic, active in both the Canadian and South African literary scenes. Her writing is informed by a multilingual poetics grounded in a fluently bilingual identity in English and Afrikaans, and a curiosity about languages generally. Her debut multilingual collection of essay-like long poems, Ekke, won the 2019 Pat Lowther Memorial Award for a book of poetry published by a woman in Canada, and was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for a debut collection. Her second English collection, Hell Light Flesh, was published by Palimpsest Press in September 2020, and her first Afrikaans book, ver taal, is currently under consideration for publication in South Africa. Her chapbook, Wax Lyrical, was shortlisted for the 2016 bpNichol Chapbook Award, and she has appeared at festivals, readings, residencies, and conferences in Canada, South Africa, the United States, and elsewhere. Ariel Resnikoff is the author of Unnatural Bird Migrator (Operating System, 2020) and the chapbooks Ten-Four: Poems, Translations, Variations (Operating System, 2015), with Jerome Rothenberg, and Between Shades (Materialist Press, 2014). His writing has been translated into Russian, French, Spanish, German, and Hebrew, and has appeared or is forthcoming in Golden Handcuffs Review, Full Stop Quarterly, Protocols, The Wolf Magazine for Poetry, Schreibheft, Zeitschrift für Literatur and Boundary2. With Stephen Ross, he is at work on the first critical bilingual edition of Mikhl Likht’s modernist Yiddish long poem, Processions, and with Lilach Lachman and Gabriel Levin, he is translating into English the collected writings of the translingual Hebrew poet Avot Yeshurun. Ariel is a reviews editor at Jacket2 and a founding editor of the journal and print-archive Supplement, copublished by the Materialist Press, Kelly Writers House, and the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania. He has taught courses on multilingual diasporic literatures at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (UPenn) and at BINA: The Jewish Movement for Social Change. In 2019, he completed his PhD in comparative literature and literary theory at the University of Pennsylvania, and and he is currently a Fulbright Postdoctoral US Scholar. Ariel lives on Alameda Island in the San Francisco Bay Area with his partner, the artist and designer Riv Weinstock, and their baby, Zamir Shalom. Sho Sugita writes and translates poetry in Matsumoto, Japan. His translation of Hirato Renkichi’s Spiral Staircase: Collected Poems (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017) is the first book of Japanese Futurist poetry to appear in English. He is currently working on translating Japanese Dada/anarchist poetry by Hagiwara Kyojiro. Moderators Alys Moody is assistant professor of literature at Bard College. She is the author of The Art of Hunger: Aesthetic Autonomy and the Afterlives of Modernism (OUP, 2018) and is currently working on a second book, provisionally entitled The Literature of World Hunger: Poverty, Global Modernism, and the Emergence of a World Literary System. She is one of the general editors of Global Modernists on Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2020), and section editor or coeditor of the sections on modernism in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, the Arab world, Japan, and the South Pacific. Stephen J. Ross is assistant professor of English at Concordia University. He is the author of Invisible Terrain: John Ashbery and the Aesthetics of Nature (OUP, 2017). He is one of the general editors of Global Modernists on Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2020), and was section editor or coeditor of the sections on modernism in the Caribbean, the Arab world, and greater China. |
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Thursday, October 1, 2020 The Joy and Curse of Translation
Bill Porter / Red Pine, TranslatorOnline Event 3:00 pm – 4:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 No one ever plans to be a translator, and no artist is more poorly equipped or trained. Nor do translators ever find out exactly what they’re doing—or even how—but, except for the fact that there’s no money it, why would they ever want to stop? Bill Porter was born in Van Nuys, California on October 3, 1943, and grew up in northern Idaho. After a tour of duty in the US Army in 1964–67, he attended college at UC Santa Barbara and majored in anthropology. In 1970, he entered graduate school at Columbia University and studied anthropology with a faculty that included Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. While he was in New York, he became interested in Buddhism, and in 1972 he left America for a Buddhist monastery in Taiwan. After three years with the monks and nuns, he struck out on his own and supported himself by teaching English and later by working as a journalist at English-language radio stations in Taiwan and Hong Kong. During this time, he married a Chinese woman, with whom he has two children, and began working on translations of Chinese poetry and Buddhist texts. In 1993, he returned to America, and has lived ever since in Port Townsend, Washington. For the past 27 years, he has worked as an independent scholar. His translations, under the name Red Pine, have been honored with two NEA translation fellowships, a PEN translation award, the inaugural Asian Literature Award of the American Literary Translators Association, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and, more recently, the Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation, bestowed by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Between December 2019 and June 2020 he published a series of seven chapbooks with Empty Bowl Press in Anacortes, including Cathay Revisited, a present for Ezra Pound’s daughter and granddaughter.Join via ZoomMeeting ID: 993 7562 8401 / Passcode: 998992 |
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Friday, April 24, 2020 BTTI Translation Symposium Student Panels
Zoom 10:00 am – 2:00 pm EDT/GMT-4Please join Bard College, Bard College at Simon's Rock, Smolny College, and Bennington College students as they present their independent translation projects and answer questions from audience members. Projects will be presented in two panels in separate Zoom events, one from 10:00 am to 12:00 pm and one from 12:00 pm to 2:00 pm EDT/GM-4. Program notes for both panels are available for download below. Panel 1: 10:00 am – 12:00 pm EDT/GM-4 Moderators: Peter Filkins and Thomas Wild Megan Halm (Bard) Soumya Rachel Shailendra (Bennington) Caleb Sabatka (Simon's Rock) Silvie Lundgren (Bard College) Join Zoom Meeting Link: https://zoom.us/j/92026202898?pwd=d0hIK3lvRUR4S04zeWppU0tTdUpBUT09 Meeting ID: 920 2620 2898 Password: 3DiurZ Panel 2: 12:00 pm –2:00 pm EDT/GM-4 Moderators: Melanie Nicholson, Olga Voronina, and Éric Trudel Jacob Szepessy (Bard) Rayo Verweij (Bard) Maggie Holloway (Bard) Evgeniia Maksimenko (Smolny College) Join Zoom Meeting Link: https://zoom.us/j/99178009261?pwd=TUNBOWFCZVlLMVVHc29BOWRqTVJjUT09 Meeting ID: 991 7800 9261 Password: 9c0RN1 Download: TTI Student Panels Program Notes Final.pdf |
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Wednesday, March 18, 2020 CANCELED Translation as Pedagogy: A Manifesto for Reading
Presentation and Discussion by Sophie Seita, Boston UniversityOlin Humanities, Room 102 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 “To translate is to surpass the source”— these are words Sophie Seita puts into the mouth of a character in her performance My Little Enlightenment Plays, a project in which she rewrites, translates, responds to, and, one could say, corresponds with Enlightenment thinkers and writers and other historical source materials. In her talk, Seita will propose an expansive understanding of translation: translation as an inventive, generative, and often collaborative practice; translation as a form of writing-as-reading; and translational reading as a pedagogical tool. She writes: “Like a manifesto, I see translation as a deeply pedagogical form. In my teaching, I promote what I would call ‘translational reading,’ which tries to understand a text by doing something with it. Following Sara Ahmed’s terminology in her manifesto‘Living a Feminist Life,’ translation would have to be in my ‘feminist survival kit.’ Translation, for me, then encompasses the moving of matter from one place to another. This might mean transforming a word, sentence, image, idea, or material (like paper, Tippex, or clay) into another form, genre, medium, or context.” Seita will discuss these theoretical ideas with a view to how they might work in practice in the context of her own translational projects, from text- and performance-based work to pedagogical experiments. |
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Friday, March 13, 2020 CANCELED: Núcleo: A Reading and Performance by Cecilia Vicuña
Bard Hall 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4Artist-poet Cecilia Vicuña creates songs, performances, installations, paintings, films, written works, books, lectures, and sculptures. Born in Chile, profoundly impacted by the encouraging time of Allende, the subsequent terrors of Pinochet, and decades lived in exile, Vicuña makes work that is always attentive to ethics, the earth, and history. Her improvisatory, participatory performances, often associated with site-specific installations, emphasize the collective nature of action and creativity to bring forth justice, balance, and the transformation of the world. Vicuña will read from her latest book, Núcleo. |
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Monday, February 17, 2020 Kid Quixote at Bard
Resnick Studio Classroom 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5“Right now and for the next five years, fifteen children ages four to seventeen at Still Waters in a Storm, a one-room schoolhouse in Brooklyn, are reading and translating Don Quixote from the Spanish original into English and retelling the tale as their own, reimagining the story of an old man in Spain in the late 1500s as a story of Spanish-speaking immigrant children living in Brooklyn today. The story has been adapted as and performed as musical theater, with dialogue and original songs written collectively by the kids. With the collaboration of world-renowned Edith Grossman, translator of the authoritative English version of Don Quixote.” Co-sponsored by LAIS, the Division of Languages and Literature, and Bard's Translation and Translatability Initiative. This event will take place in the Fisher Center's Resnick Studio classroom. Please enter the Fisher Center through the administrative entrance (near the closest parking lot) and go up the stairs to find the classroom. A greeter will be on hand to help direct you. Also, please note that seating for this event is limited and will be available on a first come, first-served basis. Seating will be primarily on the floor with a limited number of folding chairs available for accessibility. For further details, please contact Prof. López-Gay at [email protected]. |