Archive of Past Events
2023
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Thursday, November 16, 2023 Stalin and the Tragedy of Georgia
Luka Linich ’23, Bard CollegeOleg Minin, REAS, Bard College RKC 200 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5 Stalin and the Tragedy of Georgia is an English translation of a book authored by Luka Linich's great-great grandfather, Ioseb Iremashvili. Written in exile in Weimar Germany in 1932, the memoir paints an intimate portrait of his close friendship with Josef Stalin during the late 1800s and early 1900s. It delves into Stalin's formative years, his personality, family life, and the transformation from a friend into a formidable Bolshevik leader and enemy. The book also explores Stalin's ambitions, including the Soviet Union's expansion and the personal persecution of political opponents in Georgia. Luka will read from his translation and speak about the process of preparing the book for publication. In conversation with Bard faculty Oleg Minin, he will also discuss the impact this memoir text has had on Stalin scholarship. |
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Thursday, November 2, 2023 Words that don’t quite fit: Challenging the Untranslatable
Ann Goldstein, translatorJenny McPhee, NYU Daniel Mendelsohn, Bard College Mark Polizzotti, Metropolitan Museum of Art Campus Center, Weis Cinema 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 What happens when translation falters and languages cannot be reconciled? What is irremediably “foreign” in a foreign language, culture, literature and art? How to transform this challenge into a creative resource? We ask these probing questions to four of the most prominent literary translators of today, to learn from their experiences and struggles, as well as their successes. Ann Goldstein is a translator from the Italian language, best known for her celebrated translations of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet. Former editor of The New Yorker, her many translations include works from Alba de Cespedes, Elsa Morante, Giacomo Leopardi, Jhumpa Lahiri. She also edited the three-volume publication of The Complete Works of Primo Levi (2015). Jenny McPhee teaches in the Master’s in Translation and Interpreting program at NYU and in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton. Author of several novels, her translations from the Italian include works by the authors Anna Banti, Natalia Ginzburg, Primo Levi, Elsa Morante, Anna Maria Ortese, Curzio Malaparte, and Pope John Paul II. Daniel Mendelsohn is the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College. An internationally bestselling author, critic, essayist, and translator, his notable works include An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic (2017), and The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (2006). His translation of Homer’s Odyssey will be published next year. Mark Polizzotti is a publisher and editor-in-chief at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He has translated more than 50 books from the French, including works by Gustave Flaubert, Marguerite Duras and André Breton, and written 11 books, the latest of which is Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto (2018). Moderated by Marina van Zuylen (Bard) and Franco Baldasso (Bard). |
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Wednesday, November 1, 2023 Sunrise: On Creation and Translation
A conversation with Kobayashi Erika and Brian Bergstrom Olin Humanities, Room 102 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 Erika Kobayashi is a writer and visual artist based in Tokyo. Exhibitions of her artworks have been hosted both in Japan and in Europe. Her novels and short stories play with (and often challenge) the genre of the “family saga” by positing at their center the life of multiple generations of women, and with them—in an ecocritical twist—the voices of a host of animal and mineral characters. She is particularly invested in revisiting the complex history weaving the destiny of humans and nonhumans with radiation, nuclear weapons, and nuclear power. In Sunrise: Radiant Stories (Astra House, 2023)—the collection of short stories that will be the main topic of this event—she brings this focus several steps further by exploring the many complex and often unseen connections between technology, language, and social and environmental ruination. Translator Brian Bergstrom brings us a rich selection of material, including one piece written to accompany one of Kobayashi’s visual exhibitions currently unavailable in the Japanese language. Sunrise’s stories thus deepen our appreciation of the work of one of the shining stars of contemporary Japanese literature, and open a window on the multifaceted opus of the author of Trinity, Trinity, Trinity (2019). Copies of Trinity, Trinity, Trinity and Sunrise: Radiant Stories will be available for purchase at this event and are also available to order through oblongbooks.com. This event is open to the public. |
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Monday, October 23, 2023 Translation Made Me: What I Learned from Translating Maturana, Varela, Anzaldúa, Glissant, and Many Others
Keijiro Suga, University of Minnesota/Meiji UniversityOlin Humanities, Room 102 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 I am a poet, but before being a poet, I was a translator, and I still am. Having published translations in the humanities and literature from English, French, and Spanish to Japanese, my verbal matrix of creation has been shaped by translation, through translation. This talk will reveal some of my secrets and ultimately the meaning of Japan's modernity for its language. Keijiro Suga is currently the visiting chair of Asian Studies at the University of Minnesota. He is professor of critical theory at Meiji University in Tokyo, where his research focuses on the analysis of cultural production in contemporary global society. The author of ten books of essays and a prolific translator from English, Spanish, and French, he was awarded the prestigious Yomiuri Prize for Literature in 2009 for his travelogue Transversal Journeys. |
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Tuesday, October 3, 2023 „that’s how the foreign / forms conversations”
Uljana Wolf, Distinguished German Poet and EssayistHegeman 204A 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 What is a mother tongue, seen by day? Or at night, awake next to a crib? Or when someone changes diapers, performing tasks that interrupt the poem, or the I? Is this then a broken, stuttering language? A muttering tongue? A language never alone with itself, always with room for others? Since her debut collection kochanie ich habe brot gekauft (2005), which was awarded the prestigious Peter Huchel-Preis, Uljana Wolf's poems and essays have been listening to the dissolution of language in the murmur or Mutter of a shimmering multiplicity. Now finally her debut kochanie, today i bought bread has been translated into English by Greg Nissan (World Poetry Books). Simultaneously, Uljana Wolf’s new poetry collection in German, muttertask (kookbooks, 2023) attempts to blend the translingual trajectories of her latest poems with the lyrical beginnings of kochanie. Wolf will read from the new translation of kochanie ich habe brot gekauft alongside with German poems rom her new book, muttertask, as well as discuss her essays on translation and translingualism from Etymologischer Gossip. |
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Thursday, September 28, 2023 Hafiz of Shiraz and the Latency of Eternity
Peter Booth ’74, author and translatorOlin Humanities, Room 102 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Hafiz of Shiraz (1325–1392), Iran’s favorite poet and the most influential writer to ever take up a pen, in addition to being a great romantic poet is also a poet of nature. As such, true to his appellation “the tongue of the hidden mysteries,” his poetry is structured on the laws of nature—that is on the laws of physics. The presentation of physics in his poetry is in keeping both with the theories of relativity and quantum physics. Additionally, his poetry is a fascinating account of the sojourn of the soul as it travels from the mortality of separation to the immortality of union with the source of all existence—infinite, eternal, and limitlessly creative. Peter Booth ('74) is a distinguished translator and interpreter of Hafiz of Shiraz. As a pre-college teen, he studied Sanskrit at Georgetown University, then English Literature at Bard, Persian Literature in graduate school at Harvard, and finally under a scholarship from the Shah of Iran, at Ferdowsi University in Mashhad, Iran. Peter also studied physics at Georgetown University. He is the co-author of a number of books on Hafiz, including Dante/Hafiz, and The Illuminated Hafiz, with Robert Bly et al. He has translated 512 poems of Hafiz and is preparing the volume of his collected poetry for publication. Peter lives in Meherabad, India where he conducts poetry seminars. Over a period of forty-five years, using recycled waste water, Peter has transformed a treeless desert on India’s Deccan Plateau into a four-hundred acre gardened forest. |
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Tuesday, September 26, 2023 Politics of Literature and Translation In the Novels of Bachtyar Ali
Guest lecturers Kareem Abdulrahman and Bachtyar AliHegeman 201 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 Politics has at least two faces in the works of Iraqi Kurdish novelist Bachtyar Ali. While his characters are in a constant search to prove their humanity, politics often appears as a barrier in that search. In The Last Pomegranate Tree, for example, a meditation on fatherhood is intertwined with the discovery of increasing corruption in political leadership. Why does salvation seem to fall beyond politics? Given the recent history of Iraqi Kurdistan, what is the significance of politics in literature? Yet another face is the politics of literature: Kurdish language has lived on the margins of the more dominant languages in the Middle East for centuries. In this context, literary translation could be seen as an effort to put the Kurds, the largest minority group without their own nation state, on the cultural map of the world. Here the expression that the translator is a “traitor” may ring hollow when the translator appears first of all as an activist with loyalties. What then are the politics of translating Kurdish literature in the contemporary world? This event invites conversation and reflection with a novelist and his translator. |
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Thursday, September 21, 2023 Who Was Fritz Kittel
A Reichsbahn Worker Decides // 1933–2022Olin Humanities, Room 102 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Esther Dischereit Eminent German Poet, Essayist, and Activist In 2023, Esther Dischereit created an exhibition in cooperation with Deutsche Bahn to honor the railroad worker Fritz Kittel. In 1944 and 1945, he hid her mother Hella and sister Hannelore, who as Jews were persecuted by the Gestapo and threatened with death in Germany under National Socialism. They were liberated by U.S. troops in 1945. Dischereit began to search for the family of the rescuer and found them in 2019. Fritz Kittel had not told his own family about his courageous act throughout his life. Esther Dischereit's literary response in 17 text pieces includes other found objects from the lives of her mother, sister, and Fritz Kittel, and they offer a dialogue with those who are now the daughters and sons or grandchildren. False information given at a registration office, illegal names and addresses ... What do we read when we read these documents?What do we see when we look at these photos? Esther Dischereit lives in Berlin, writes prose, poems, essays and radio works. Recent publications: Hab keine Angst! Erzähl alles. Das Attentat von Halle und die Stimmen der Überlebenden (Ed., 2020). Sometimes a Single Leaf (2020), Flowers for Otello On the Crimes that Came out of Jena (2022) – both transl. by Iain Galbraith. Wer war Fritz Kittel, Exhibition 2023: Berlin / Frankfurt am Main / Chemnitz / Nürnberg. Maggie Hough studies Classics, German, philosophy and theater at Bard College. |
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Friday, May 19, 2023 Sui Generis 2023
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium 3:30 pm – 5:30 pm EDT/GMT-4Please join us on Friday, May 19 at 3:30 pm in RKC 103 for the presentation of the latest issue of Sui Generis, Bard’s student-run journal dedicated to literary translation. Please come to celebrate the hard work of the journal’s editorial board and the many translators who contributed to a robust and diverse issue of the journal. In addition to readings of work in many languages and in English translation, there will be light refreshments. All are welcome! |
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Friday, May 5, 2023 Windows, Murk, and Magic Spells in Daniil Kharms: A Translation Workshop
Matvei Yankelevich, Lecturer in Translation and Book Arts, Columbia UniversityOlin Humanities, Room 202 1:00 pm – 3:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Matvei Yankelevich is a poet, translator, and editor whose publications include Some Worlds for Dr. Vogt (Black Square), Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (Overlook), and, most recently, the chapbook Dead Winter (Fonograf). He is the editor of World Poetry Books, a nonprofit publisher of poetry in translation, and teaches translation and book arts at Columbia University's School of the Arts. Yankelevich will illustrate translation strategies as they apply to the work of Daniil Kharms, iconoclastic writer of the early Soviet avant garde; participants of the workshop will join forces in the translation of a few short works by Kharms. Proficiency in Russian is not required. We particularly encourage creative writers of all sorts to join their Russian-proficient peers in this rare opportunity to learn from a master of poetic translation. |
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Friday, April 28, 2023 Knock Knock: Jokes in Translation
Karen Raizen, Bard CollegeCampus Center, Weis Cinema 1:30 pm – 3:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Jokes don't translate easily. Wordplay, dark humor, and even memes often fall flat when translated to other languages, since they hinge on specific linguistic and cultural features. In this workshop, we will explore the challenges surrounding jokes in translation. We will also tell jokes, and attempt to translate them. No prior knowledge of any particular language is required. Laughing is optional. |
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Friday, April 21, 2023 How to Study Literature through Translation?
Aaron Dickinson, David Taylor-Demeter, and Bridget White, students of German language and literature at BardThree Creative Approaches Olin LC 208 11:30 am – 1:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Literature keeps the experience of the unexpected alive. The experience that things can be said in surprisingly beautiful, concise, funny, nuanced, ways, or simply put: differently. How to say things differently is the daily bread of studying and practicing another language. Just the same can be said of translation! To invite diverse practices of translation into the classroom thus offers particularly generative and joyful ways of studying both literature and languages. At this panel, three students of German language and literature share their work on and with translation through multilingual and multimedia presentations: Aaron Dickinson, in a dramatic reenactment of the translation process, reflects on the conversation with yourself, here with his draconic and ironic other selves while transferring poems by Rainer Maria Rilke from German to English. David Taylor-Demeter unfolds the captivating complexity of Barbara Honigmann’s novel "Soharas Reise" (Sohara’s Journey) through the analysis of a single sentence and its possible translations into English. Bridget White engages with the act of translation as a multi-sensory experience in her presentation of “buchstabenkonstellationen”, or letter-constellations, inspired by and in dialog with eminent visual poet Franz Mon. Everyone is welcome! No previous knowledge of German required. |
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Tuesday, April 18, 2023 Gender, Sexuality, and Feminism in Pakistani Urdu Writing
Amina Yaqin, University of Exeter, Associate Professor of World LiteratureOlin Humanities, Room 102 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 My book offers a new understanding of progressive women’s poetry in Urdu and the legacy of postcolonial politics. It underlines Urdu’s linguistic hybridities, the context of the zenana, reform, and rekhti to illustrate how the modernising impulse under colonial rule impacted women as subjects in textual form. My argument draws on genealogies of gender in Urdu literary culture from the canonical texts for sharif women from Mirat-ul Arus to Umrao Jan Ada that need to be looked at alongside women’s diaries and autobiographies so that we have an overall picture of gendered lives from imaginative fiction, memoirs and biographies. The influence of the Left, Marxist thought and resistance against colonial rule fired the Progressive Writers Movement in the 1930s. In post-Partition Pakistan, despite the disintegration of the Progressive Writers Movement and the official closure of the Left in Pakistan, I argue that an exceptional legacy can be found in the voices of distinctive women poets including Ada Jafri, Zehra Nigah, Sara Shagufta, Parvin Shakir, Fahmida Riaz and Kishwar Naheed. Their poems offer new metaphors and symbols borrowing from feminist thought and a hybrid Islamicate culture. Riaz and Naheed joined forces with the women’s movement in Pakistan in the 1980s and caused some discomfort amongst Urdu literary circles with their writing. Celebrated across both sides of the border, their poetry and politics is less well known than the verse of the progressive poet par excellence Faiz Ahmed Faiz or the hard hitting lyrics of Habib Jalib. The book demonstrates how they manipulate and appropriate a national language as mother tongue speakers to enunciate a middle ground between the sacred and secular. In doing so they offer a new aesthetic that is inspired by activism and influenced by feminist philosophy. |
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Friday, April 7, 2023 Collecting Fragments: An Arabic-Persian Translation Workshop
Professor Amir Moosavi, Rutgers UniversityOlin LC 118 10:00 am – 12:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Translation finds its etymology in the movement of meaning across space. In this workshop, participants are invited to experiment with translating fragments of Arabic poetry (by machine, by correspondence, into and out of Persian). We will then work to assemble and embellish these fragments, producing a multilingual page styled on pre-modern albums that were designed to be read collectively as a showcase of the diversity of the Islamic world. |
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Friday, March 31, 2023 The Many Masks of Federico García Lorca
John Burns, Associate Professor of Spanish, Bard CollegeOlin Humanities, Room 102 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 Federico García Lorca is perhaps the most recognizable Spanish poet in English translation. This workshop will explore the many ways in which Lorca's poetry has been translated with sometimes radically different results. In addition to comparing some different translations of some of Lorca's poetry, we will attempt to translate some of his work as a group, although no prior knowledge of Spanish is required. |
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Friday, March 10, 2023 Finding an Authentic Voice for an Ancient Poet: Translating Eugenius of Toledo
Graham Barrett, University of Lincoln, UK David Ungvary, Bard College Olin Humanities, Room 102 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm EST/GMT-5 “Be present to us, You Holy One, loosen the muscles of our throats, fill our mouths with articulate phrases, fill our hearts with tears…” “Blubbery fat on his neck chokes off his pudgy gullet and his horribly raspy voice loses its dulcet tones.” These starkly different couplets were composed during the so-called “Dark Ages” by the same Latin poet: Eugenius of Toledo (d. 657 CE). Maybe. In this workshop, Professors Graham Barrett (University of Lincoln, UK) and David Ungvary (Bard) will expose participants to the challenges of locating an authentic “voice” in Eugenius’s verse, which has never before been rendered into English, but which, in the Middle Ages, was popular enough to inspire a host of imitators and pseudo-Eugenian posers. Together, those in the workshop will explore—partly through experiments in re-writing Eugenius—how various modes of translation may help (or hinder) attempts to find and animate the “true Eugenius,” a poet whose tone can range wildly from pious and reverent to just plain mean. All students and faculty interested in translation are encouraged to attend; no knowledge of Latin is necessary. |
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Friday, February 17, 2023 Honyakking: Translating Japanese, Editing English, and Labor's Love Lost and Found
Alexa Frank ’15, Assistant Editor, HarperVia / HarperCollinsCampus Center, Weis Cinema 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5 Japanese manga is one of publishing’s biggest pandemic-era success stories. Having reached new market sales heights in 2020, the medium continues to see explosive growth and visibility. But what does that success mean in the wider landscape of translated literature, when cover credit for translators remains a hot-button issue, and translators remain underpaid and under-recognized? How can we properly savor the fruits of our labor when laboring in the present system of print capitalism? The talk will discuss making the jump from Barnes and Noble manga section stalwart to professional manga translator, editing literature in English translation, and surviving, thriving, and sometimes even crying while working in an industry where passion doesn’t pay the rent. Alexa Frank’15 is a translator and editor based in New York. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Fulbright Program, she has translated over 20 volumes of manga, such as Kyoko Okazaki's River’s Edge and Nazuna Saito’s Offshore Lightning (both to be released this June). She currently works an assistant editor at HarperVia, an imprint of HarperCollins, where she has edited titles such as Tomihiko Morimi’s The Tatami Galaxy (translated from Japanese by Emily Balistrieri, and longlisted for the 2023 PEN Translation Prize). She is a member of the HarperCollins Union, which has been on strike since November 10, 2022. |