List of Accepted Sessions for ALTA48

This panel brings together emerging and established translators to explore the evolving landscape of literary translation and the challenges and opportunities afforded by technological and ideological shifts. From the role of AI and digital tools in reshaping translation and publication models to the emergence of new voices and reimaginings of the canon, we will discuss how translation practices are transforming in this constantly evolving field. How can mentorship, experimentation, and collaboration foster more inclusive, sustainable, and dynamic practices? What can emerging and established translators learn from one another? The panelists will share their thoughts on navigating these changes as we envision translation’s future as a space of connection and innovation.

Moderator: Adam Tapper

Panelists: Lya Shaffer, Matvei Yankelevich, Alta L. Price, Maja Teref

How’d they do that? Translators engage with many different local, national, and international communities, and the deeper we get into one of them, the more we realize that we’re all supported by a loosely affiliated community of communities – universities, ALTA, publishers, bookshops, libraries. What happens when we collaborate to bring these institutions together? Sasha Senderovich on the founding and evolution of University of Washington’s Translation Studies Hub; Sean Gasper Bye on experiences with ALTA, the Polish Institute, and translator collective Cedilla & Co.; Gabi Page-Fort on publishing, Seattle City of Literature, and Academy of American Poets; and Esther Allen on the Baruch undergrad program, World Poetry, and her extensive experience across institutions.

Moderator: Gabriella Page-Fort

Panelists: Sasha Senderovich, Sean Gasper Bye, Esther Allen, Olivia Sears

SEEKING PARTICIPANTS

The field of literary translation has flourished in recent years: more journals and presses eager to publish translations, more prizes, more opportunities for emerging translators. Yet in our current moment, much of what we have built feels imperiled, whether by devastating cuts to the NEA, threats to freedom of expression, or the cascade of xenophobic policies. In this panel, publishers, past funders, and leaders of translation initiatives take the long view. Join us as we honor the legacy and impact of four decades of NEA translation fellowships, and dream big about what comes next for our field. What do translators and publishers of translation need, now? What do we want the future of translation to look like, and how can we shape it together?

Moderator Name: Elisabeth Jaquette

Panelists: Amy Stolls, Michael Holtmann

Contact: Elisabeth Jaquette, elisabeth@wordswithoutborders.org

What is the relationship between text and textile? How does translation unweave and weave cultural, historical, and linguistic threads into a new textile of its own? Drawing on the theme of Visions and Versions, this panel examines new translations from Latin America that envision translation not simply as a new version, but as its own woven fabric or aguayo. Following the Inka tradition of quipu and critical reflections by poets like Daniela Catrileo and Andrés Ajens, who link Indigenous textile traditions to poetry, this panel explores how poetic fabrics move in translation. In this discussion, translators, scholars, and editors working across Latin American and Indigenous literatures will explore how translation reimagines the relationship between text and textile, word and weaving.

Moderator: Kristin Dykstra

Panelists: Michelle Gil-Montero, Edith Adams, Cristina Pinto-Bailey, Lynette Yetter

SEEKING PARTICIPANTS

The Philippines has over 120 languages. Filipino, based on Tagalog, is widely spoken in Metro Manila. Many second- and third-generation Filipinx Americans no longer speak their parents’ native languages. Yet, strong enrollment in heritage Filipino classes shows a desire to reconnect through language. In this post monolingual condition, where the pedestal of a solo mother tongue or an “origin” language is dismantled, lies a translanguaging of sorts where multilingual speakers negotiate linguistic resources in order to give in or perhaps, not to completely give in to the hegemonic language. From bilingual books to poetry, these linguistic acts challenge erasure and redefine translation as a lived, resistant practice in the Filipinx diaspora, opening translation to new functions.

Moderator:

Panelists: Vyxz Vasquez, Christian Jil R. Benitez, Karen Llagas

Contact: Vyxz Vasquez, lmvasquez@ucsd.edu

SEEKING PARTICIPANTS

Marjorie Agosín’s prolific career was cut short in March 2025. This panel will honor the corpus of her work. As writer, poet, and activist she strove to raise awareness about human rights abuses in her native Chile and what it meant to be Jewish and Latina. According to Ruth Behar, ¨(Marjorie) wanted to be known in translation, to be a translated woman.” Dennis Maloney, editor of White Pine Press, will share remembrances of publishing Agosin’s work over the course of four decades. Suzanne Jill Levine will discuss her experiences translating Notes from the Sea, a collection of Agosin’s prose poems (White Pine Press, 2024). And Jill Gibian will discuss how the themes of memory, loss and exile that were prevalent in her writings were transposed intersemiotically into dance and film.

Moderator: Jill Gibian

Panelists: Dennis Maloney, Suzanne Jill Levine

Contact: Jill Gibian, jgibian@eou.edu

What does it mean to practice queer(ing) translation? How do we explore and expand queer translation practices, keeping in mind the complexities of identity and visibility across cultures? Does the current political climate demand a new vision for a queer translation community? To what extent can and should queer translation enact resistance? From the texts and authors we select to the translation approaches we employ to where we choose – or are able – to publish, queer translation offers unique opportunities and additional challenges, urging us to reimagine how and why we do this work. Join the panelists a year after the revival of the queer translation caucus to collectively explore these questions, share experiences, and strengthen a sense of queer literary translation community.

Moderator: paparouna

Panelists: Kanika Agrawal, M.L. Martin, Erel Michaelis, poupeh missaghi 

During a translation project, have you ever said to yourself: “this could use another set of eyes”? Because an editor is rarely able to consult the source text, these manuscripts are a great opportunity to introduce a bilingual review into your process. A bilingual review can be an intensive, one-on-one workshop for your manuscript where you invite your peer to dive with you into the translation weeds. Our panelists have either sought out a fellow translator to do a bilingual review or been invited by their peer to do a bilingual review on their work and will share why and how they incorporated this step into the translation process on certain projects.

Moderator: Michelle Mirabella

Panelists: George Henson, Jenna Tang, Corine Tachtiris, Thuý Đinh

This panel focuses on new visions and versions of translating canonical and peripheral poetry from China into English, with an eye on the rise of AI and its impact on the latest approaches to literary translation in China. Fang Shangyang will talk about his new translation/retranslation of the overlooked and lesser known “Ci” lyric genre in the classical Chinese canon. Zhang Xuemeng will talk about her work in machine translation and her research regarding the uses, misuses, and abuses of AI in new renditions of contemporary Chinese avant-garde poetry. Elvin Meng will talk about his translation of northeastern Chinese ethnic minority literatures of the past that were never featured in the classical canon, especially his recent work in rendering a Manchu-language epic into English.

Moderator: Zhongzhi Chen

Panelists: Fang Shangyang, Zhang Xuemeng, Elvin Meng, Yuemin He

Modern Hebrew, a temporal koine language, often produces literature whose language is in dialogue with the past iterations of itself. The primary sources of Hebrew are divine /masculine (Bible). Four reflect upon their current translation projects from Hebrew which, contain multiple interpretations of a single event, multiple voices and genders in a single speaking throat; engage in multiple planes of existence (through prayer, devastating sorrow, memory, and migration). Recognizing the gendered nature of the texts we are translating, and recent women’s translations of prominant masculine texts, we consider the lense of gender among the multiple ways of seeing, interpreting, emerging through and against the ((super)natural) interpreted world.

Moderator: Marcela Sulak

Panelists: Becka Mara McKay, Aviya Kushner, Yardenne Greenspan, Tzvia Gover

SEEKING 2nd LEADER

What happens when queerness enters translation—not just as content, but as method, voice, and disruption? This interactive workshop explores queer translation as a creative and political act of vision and version. Through short excerpts and collaborative exercises, we’ll examine how queer texts challenge linguistic and cultural norms, inviting ambiguity, play, and transformation. Participants will reflect on translating desire, defying binaries, and queering fidelity itself. Open to all language pairs and experience levels.

Leader 1: George Henson, gberthenson@gmail.com

Leader 2: Seeking an additional workshop leader who identifies as LGBTQI and BIPOC

SEEKING 2nd LEADER

This workshop invites translators to consider how techniques of performance and collaboration (with translators present and absent) influence strategies for retranslation. In small groups, translators will work on rendering and staging short, previously translated theatrical scenes, comparing and developing techniques and approaches, discussing priorities, and problem-solving, integrating methods from acting pedagogy into their collaboration. Participants will be encouraged to experiment and challenge each other. This workshop will be a great opportunity to meet and work closely with other translators on a short and hopefully satisfying text.

Leader 1: Bela Shayevich, bshayevich@gmail.com

Multilingual texts challenge traditional notions of fidelity and fluency, asking translators to engage creatively with layered voices, shifting registers, and linguistic hybridity. Drawing on Ellen Jones’ Literature in Motion and Susanne Klinger’s Translation and Linguistic Hybridity, this hands-on workshop explores 30+ strategies for rendering multilingualism in translation, each opening up new visions of meaning and shaping distinct versions of the text for readers. Participants will examine sample excerpts, then select and apply a strategy in a guided translation exercise. We’ll close with optional read-alouds and reflection. Open to translators working from any language into English. Please bring a short excerpt (150–250 words) to experiment with.

Leader 1: Jenny Bhatt, Clara Burghelea

For many different reasons, authors often use multiple languages in their poetry or prose. Generally these are the language of their intended audience, plus other languages that their primary audience may or may not know. The authors may gloss those other languages in one way or another, or they may not. English-language readers may know those other languages (which might include English) better or worse than the original readers do. How do we as translators deal? How do we preserve the feel and intent of the original? How do we help our readers understand? Panelists will discuss their experiences and opinions and invite the audience to do the same.

Moderator: Dick Cluster

Panelists: Odile Cisneros, Anne O. Fisher, Lara Norgaard, Urayoan Noel

Holmes wrote: “I firmly believe in new translations for every generation.” Cohen judged that great books should “be re-translated once in a century.” Tate opined: “good translations are never obsolete.” Benjamin affirmed that “important works of world literature never find their chosen translators at the time of their origin” while Holmes thought “[t]ranslations either have to be contemporary with the original or contemporary with us.” Why are retranslations necessary or desirable? To what aesthetic, political, hermeneutic, and/or market factors do they respond? Do retranslations occasion certain methodologies? The panelists will discuss their recent versions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Montaigne’s essays, and Hernández’s Martín Fierro to justify these new renderings.

Moderator: Gary Racz

Panelists: C. Luke Soucy, Tess Lewis, Diane Arnson Svarlien

The world doesn’t need mediocre literature, not even in translation. When translators creatively rewrite a work using a different vocabulary and grammar, should they aim for equivalence or to produce the best piece of literature they can? What does it mean for a translation to be “better” than the source? What kind of “improvement” would carry a translation across the line into the realm of adaptation? When should the author be involved? Do these questions change when translating between languages that are linguistically closer or farther apart?

Moderator: Luke Leafgren

Panelists: Ellen Elias-Bursac, Lin King, Daniel Owen, Lynette Yetter

This panel addresses the multiple visions of Lusophone cultures and versions and variations of the Portuguese language, and how such differences are rendered in translation. Our panelists work with the literatures of different countries and regions—from Portugal and Brazil to Mozambique and Macau—and will speak about their experiences, addressing topics such as the differences in spoken language across the Lusophone world; differences between written and spoken language; and the regional and cultural differences seen within such a large country as Brazil. Some of the panelists are members of the Portuguese-English Literary Translators Association (PELTA) and will briefly talk about the organization, its purposes, and resources it offers to translators at different stages in their careers.

Moderator: Cristina Pinto-Bailey

Panelists: Padma Viswanathan, Ilze Duarte, Thomas Mira y Lopez, Elizabeth Lowe

In this panel, dedicated to translating the practices, lore and liturgy of various churches and faiths, Anna Krushelnitskaya will reflect on rendering Eastern Orthodox Christian content in poetry translation; Val Vinokur will discuss the challenges and ambiguities involved in translating religious language in the stories of Isaac Babel; Monika Cassel will explore whether and how to provide cultural and historical context when translating poems about religious meditation by the German poet Daniela Ganz, who lives in the region of the former East Germany where the Lutheran Reformation began; and Kanika Agrawal will speak about contextualizing Islamic and Hindu religious or spiritual concepts and language in translating poems by Mirza Ghalib and the bhakti poets of India.

Moderator: Josephine von Zitzewitz

Panelists: Anna Krushelnitskaya, Monika Cassel, Val Vinokur, Kanika Agrawal

With Asian literature in translation winning global awards, South Asian translations, long underrepresented on the international stage, are experiencing marginal improvements in publication and reception in the U.S. market. Bangladeshi fiction in translation has yet to make a dent. In the last sixteen years however there has been a noticeable leap with translated novels from Bangladesh coming out in India. This panel, which includes translators, critics, a translation MFA student, and a former editor of a literary page of a Dhaka newspaper, will discuss such topics as the role of translation publishing within Bangladesh, the status of reviews and criticism in and outside South Asia, potential publishers in India and the U.S., and writers in English taking on translation.

Moderator: Sarah Anjum Bari

Panelists: Mahmud Rahman, Torsa Ghosal, Quamrul Hassan, Shabnam Nadiya

Translating is hard. Translating aesthetic value is even harder. In terms of both diction and content, poetry that embodies grotesque excess–especially poetry that inhabits the queer body, the devout body, the disabled body, the displaced body–requires translators to engage in an intimate relationship with language and content. The translator must distend language through creative subjectivity, exploring the target language’s ability to hold the context. Discussing how they grapple with the limits and intimacies of language-creation, writer-translators will speak to redefining embodied excess across linguistic practices–Maltese, German, Italian, and Spanish–to render their translations equitably grotesque.

Moderator: Miriam Calleja

Panelists: Hannah V Warren, Jace Brittain, Robert Eric Shoemaker, John Wall Barger

The translation memoir as a genre is gaining in importance, as is the imperative to discuss translation as an art evolved from lineage. This panel seeks to explore the memoir as a translator’s legacy, literary chronicle of a life journey, and alternative versions of the art of translation. Suzanne Jill Levine and Elizabeth Lowe knew each other as students in Spain in the 1960s and have remained friends and colleagues throughout their careers. They will discuss their newly published memoirs in a panel with Peter Bush and editor Mario Pereira. Jill’s book Unfaithful: a translator’s memoir is the first of the “Translated By” series by Bloomsbury Academic (June 2025). Elizabeth’s book “Translating from the Portuguese: A Life Translated” is by Tagus Press (October 2025).

Moderator: Elizabeth Lowe

Panelists: Suzanne Jill Levine, Odile Cisneros, Mario Pereira

In this panel, translators of Global South literatures discuss the process of navigating the complex choice between retranslating the canon, and foregrounding contemporary texts written in the source language. What are the metrics for “justifying” retranslations—corrective impulse,“improvement” through decolonial translations, or multiplicity of versions? Is there merit instead in prioritizing new works in the language contemporaneous with the world literatures of the day? Can the anglophone world begin to grasp the complex history of a culture, language and its literary tradition, if there is such a lacunae in the translation of a literature’s classics? How do we activate these points of lineage to create a more broader context of tradition in the translation of regional literatures.

Moderator: Kavita Singh

Panelists: Rohan Chhetri, Wendy Chen, Ibrahim Badshah, Aruni Kashyap

What voices do we turn to as models when translating poetry? Do we see ourselves as part of a lineage—or many lineages? This session invites literary translators to reflect on the voices that guide them: predecessors whose decisions illuminate our own, writers whose versions we respond to or resist, and poets whose cadences echo through our work. From Ursula K. Le Guin’s translations of Gabriela Mistral to Borges’s translations of Walt Whitman and Virginia Woolf, we’ll explore how influence, affinity, kinship, and textual lineage shape our choices on the page.

Moderator: Eduardo Aparicio

Panelists: Martha Kosir, Achy Obejas, Kareem James Abu-Zeid

Literary translation is an artistic endeavor, but publishing a translation is a business transaction, ideally governed by a fair and mutually beneficial contract. Knowing basic contractual terms governing payment, rights, and deadlines empowers you as a translator. This panel will share reference materials for drafting and reviewing contracts and will feature the panelists’ real-life experiences negotiating recent translation agreements. We will address contracts between publisher and translator, between author and translator, and between agent and translator with the goal of arming literary translators with the knowledge they need to ensure fair agreements. This panel is organized by members of the Translators Organizing Committee of the National Writers Union.

Moderator: Larissa Kyzer

Panelists: Shelley Fairweather-Vega, Allana Lieberman

This panel brings together translators working across multiple languages and contexts of Central Asia, the Caucasus, Eastern Europe, Siberia, and the Russian Far North who will share their experiences creating anthologies and working with translations as educators and scholars. They will discuss the challenges of translating, contextualizing, analyzing, and canonizing literary texts from a part of the world that is often ignored in literary markets and university curricula. Speakers include contributors and editors of Tulips in Bloom: an Anthology of Central Asian Literature (Palgrave, 2024), Amanat: a Women’s Writing from Kazakhstan (Gaudy Boy, 2022), Reindeer Caravan: An Anthology of Indigenous Literature from Siberia (forthcoming, Amherst College Press) and the journal Turkoslavia.

Moderator: Naomi Caffee

Panelists: Shelley Fairweather-Vega, Sabrina Jaszi, Tatiana Filimonova

This panel explores the implications of feminist versions/visions in literary translation. Questions we will raise include: by what criteria do we identify an existing text or its translation as feminist?; how does a feminist vision of and for literature influence the ways we read and select source texts?; what kinds of choices in the rewriting process align with visions of feminism?; what publishing practices are intentionally feminist and which merely allow feminism to exist?; how do readers and critics receive explicitly feminist texts in translation and does this differ from their readings of texts translated with intentionally feminist visions?

Moderator: Luise von Flotow

Panelists: Leah Leone, Tiffany Creegan Miller, Diana Thow, Razieh Araghi

Fresh take on translating poetry by Latin American women with the translators and coeditor of Flores raras, anthology of Uruguayan women poets, born between 1787 and 1940, many marginalized by race, mental illness, gender, and a canon that erases the existence of early Latin American women poets. Translators will address the issues involved in making fresh retranslations of poets such of well-known poets such as Delmira Agustini, as well as the difficulties of translating lesser known or unknown poets such as Virginia Brindis de Salas, the first Black woman to publish a book of poetry in Latin America; Amalia de Figueredo, who published outside the literary center Montevideo, and Edgarda Cadanazzi, a surrealist poet in a country not known for surrealists who died without a published book.

Moderator: Jesse Lee Kercheval

Panelists: Mary Hawley, Gary Racz, Maria L. Figueredo, Nimalah Baaith-Ducharme

Research is often seen as an activity separate from translation itself, an auxiliary or aid to it. Yet historians of the footnote—the hallmark of a work’s research-based scholarly authority—locate its origin in marginal glosses of foreign terms: translation. English lit scholars have recently returned to “close reading,” claiming that to closely read a text and produce an argument about its meaning constitutes knowledge-production: research. What is a translation if not a close reading—one that is also an endeavor of cultural and linguistic exploration? The translator engages with elements central to literary research: intention, narrative voice, ideology, historical context. If research is a contribution to knowledge, literary translation itself is research.

Moderator: Esther Allen

Panelists: Alta Price, Chenxin Jiang, Peter Constantine

This panel gathers literary translators working with under-translated, non-Western languages to explore the challenges of translating into dominant global languages. Translation can be a fraught process: how to carry literature across linguistic borders without flattening textures or losing its spirit? When the receiving language carries the weight of political, cultural, & stylistic dominance, how do translators preserve the unique character of the source language & resist its erasure? Panelists will speak from their lived experience—grappling with diaspora, colonial histories & the challenge of doing justice to works shaped by distinct worldviews & traditions—& will share what hinders the process & what helps: from collaboration to hesitation, from archival research to poetic instinct.

Moderator: Curtis Bauer

Panelists: Naveed Alam, Aron Aji, Kareem James Abu-Zeid, Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse

This panel brings together translators of four pivotal 20th-century Iranian poets—Nima Yushij, Ahmad Shamlou, Forough Farrokhzad, and Mehdi Akhavan-Sales—whose work reshaped modern Persian poetry. These were the revolutionaries who broke from classical forms (like those of Rumi and Hafez) widely translated in the West. From reinventing form and language to speaking radical truths, turning inner life into subversion, and elegizing a fractured society, each poet presents distinct challenges in translation. How do we preserve radical urgency while adapting to new contexts? How does translation carry resistance into the future without softening its impact? Join us for a lively discussion on voice, context, and the evolving role of translation. Audience Q&A to follow.

Moderator: Niloufar Talebi

Panelists: Elizabeth T. Gray Jr., Kaveh Bassiri, Ghazal Mosadeq

As a medical condition of the eye, diplopia refers to seeing the same image twice. But what about the notion of seeing double as referring to the process of encountering a source text that includes at least two different languages, both visible to the same translator? This panel endeavors to think through several such cases, in which cultural, political, and socio-linguistic conditions of the source text includes two languages in a complex relationship, each in need of being seen, simultaneously, on its own and as part of a pair. Challenges of translating from such doubly seen source texts—Albanian and Italian, Ukrainian and German & Polish, Spanish and Zapotec, Japanese and other East Asian Languages, Yiddish and Russian—into a single untwinned tongue will also be discussed.

Moderator: Sasha Senderovich

Panelists: Diana Thow, Miharu Yano, Wendy Call, Vitaly Chernetsky

Five panelists discuss the various solidarities in translation—with authors and texts, with languages and ideas, and with each other. In an act historically understood through the lens of loyalty, translators reimagine and revise into the possibility of community instead. Of interest both to starting translators and established ones, five panelists discuss the social and intellectual designs of their translation trajectories over time and across languages, from how translating literature began, what questions developed and remained in the process, the changing relationship between making and publishing, including financially, collaborations with authors, editors, collaborators, and friends, and various questions translators have as they travel toward putting their works out in the world.

Moderator: Cindy Juyoung Ok

Panelists: Jenna Tang, Farid Matuk, Parisa Saranj, Stine An 

Hong Kong is a work in translation between English, written Chinese, and Cantonese, as well as Mandarin, Hakka, Tagalog, and the territory’s many other languages. Its literature, too, plays with these multiplicities. This panel invites five Sinophone translators from Hong Kong to discuss the identities, styles, and genres of Hongkongese literature that have yet to appear in Anglophone translation. As translators who live with/in English, Chinese, and other languages, we’ll also challenge the notions of exophony and heritage translation, and dialogue on the recent creation and future aims of the Hong Kong Translators’ Collective. What margins of Hong Kong literature will our voices center? What visions will they illustrate for Sinophone literature in translation?

Moderator: Chenxin Jiang

Panelists: Michelle Chan Schmidt, Tim Tim Cheng, Jacqueline Leung, Fion Tse

We come to translation inside bodies—with pains, joys, illnesses, races, genders, classes and (dis)abilities. Yet traditional approaches to translation elide the body. This panel seeks to upend this disembodied convention and think about how the body might inform, impede, and complicate translation. How is translation an invitation to perform the embodied gestures of another? How does translating with our specific bodies invite us to perform different versions of others and ourselves? How do interactions with authors (both in-person encounters and more abstract ones) define and redefine our work and ourselves? The four translator-scholars on this panel reflect on these questions in relation to the translation of Québécois, Caribbean, Latin American, and Russian literatures.

Moderator: Julie-Françoise Tolliver

Panelists: JD Pluecker, Kavita Ashana Singh, Daria Shchukina

This panel reframes translation around an ethics of care. Translation has, in recent years, been discussed as an act of violence (such as by Solomon), of hospitality (such as by Myers), or of transgression (such as by Göransson & McSweeney). Given translation’s scope, what does it look like, additionally, as an act of care? For whom or what do we care—through our translation practices—and how? Beyond that, how can translation—as an act of care—build community and solidarity both locally and globally? Through introspective questions, this panel will collectively explore practices of care. Rather than offer definitive answers, we will dialogue dynamically, and investigations of all participants—both panelists and audience—will constitute the panel’s takeaways.

Moderator: Emma Murray

Panelists: Gleisson Alves Santos, Fabienne Rink, Fion Tse

This panel examines the translator’s role as a cultural diplomat when engaging with authors from marginalized or peripheral communities. In these contexts, translators serve not only as linguistic mediators but also as cultural advocates, amplifying silenced voices, challenging dominant narratives, and fostering cross-cultural empathy. This approach frames translation as a creative and political space where alternative versions of the world are made visible. When seen through this lens, literary translation becomes an act of advocacy, social justice, and queer representation.
Panelists working with authors from Argentina, Korea, Mauritius, Poland, and Uruguay will explore how the translator navigates their responsibilities to both author and audience.

Moderator: Jona Colson

Panelists: Sergio Waisman, Joon-Li Kim, Mira Rosenthal, Nancy Naomi Carlson

New translations can offer access to important premodern poetic voices–particularly those that have been sidelined by biases related to gender, religion, or colonialism. This panel brings together poet-translators of four premodern lyric poets from different parts of Asia (China, northern and southern India, and Afghanistan/India) whose work, though renowned in their homelands, has not been widely read in the English-speaking world. The panelists will explore in conversation their journeys into these projects; the ways the language of contemporary poetry might enliven and be enlivened by engagement with the premodern; and the range of techniques and tactics we can bring to the re-visioning of these lyric masters from the past.

Moderator: Chloe Martinez

Panelists: Wendy Chen, Homa Mojadidi, Vivek Narayanan

Borges wrote that translations reflect a lengthy lottery of experimental omissions and emphases; thus, we know that comparing multiple versions of the same poem sheds a great deal of light on the translators’ processes and on the workings of the original poem, but what can we learn from AI renderings? Particularly from their express justifications for word choices? The shades produced may represent biases in their translation methods (and in our prompts) and reveal the cultural, linguistic, and resonant “naughty knots” in the poem, both providing wonderful tools for teaching students to read and appreciate poetry as well as how to translate lyrical texts. In this session we will explore this phenomenon through different versions by various translators, poets, and AI engines.

Moderator: Lisa Rose Bradford

Panelists: Russell Scott Valentino, Steve Bradbury

In her introduction to Hair on Fire: Afghan Women Poets, Aria Aber asks, “What constitutes literary unity among a people who are as diasporic as Afghans?” Three translators of Afghan poetry will discuss the nuances of translating Afghan poets and introducing them to an Anglophone readership. With a focus on language, exile, and canonization, the panelists will examine what we gain by bringing together the voices of Afghan women poets under the umbrella of an “Afghan literature,” as well as the pitfalls. Panelists will also discuss the struggles of representing the full spectrum of Afghan poetry across its many languages, ethnicities, and borders.

Moderator: Sarah Coolidge

Panelists: Sabrina Nouri, Samantha Cosentino, Diana Arterian

How can we think and teach in a way that reflects the rich variety of translations through which we come to know the literatures of the world? In this panel, faculty and alumni from Boston University’s MFA in Literary Translation draw on digital variora of translations of Turkish and Ottoman literature and classical Japanese poetry, classroom experience in Mexico and the United States, and Franz Kafka’s publication history to argue that teaching in and among translation is not about finding the “correct” version. Instead, we must occupy an interstitial space and reconstruct potential meanings that take into account multiple aspects of the text’s life cycle, including authorial revision, re-translation, editorial input, and academic commentary.

Moderator: J. Keith Vincent

Panelists: Anna Zielinska-Elliott, Roberta Micallef, Lia Galván, Dina Famin

US is a country of immigrants. Many of us, for various reasons, were separated from our mother language. But some of us have decided to not only to relearn it but also to use translation as a vehicle to reconnect with our roots. This panel will celebrate the motivation, challenges and aspirations of the people who reconnected with the language of their ancestors. And above all, how has translation helped in this process. What were our defeats and wins in the translation domain? And what advice do we have for people who want to take a similar translation journey?

Moderator: Ammara Ahmad

Panelists: Gabriel Gudding, Casie Woodard, Jack Jung, Magdalena Zurawski

How much of themselves should poet-translators bring to the table? Do some “versions” of the original go too far? Discover how the translator’s subjectivity becomes a creative force. Translators wield the power to render the poem’s essence rather than strictly its words. This panel explores the creative power of translation, bridging cultures and unveiling novel expressions of language. Join us to see how four translators working in such languages as French (including Djiboutian French), Russian, and Spanish drive creativity in their chosen poem. Panelists will engage with each other’s creative decisions, enriching the conversation about voice and diversity in literary translation. To encourage lively discussion, attendees will receive handouts with the four poems and translations.

Moderator: Don Boes

Panelists: Don Bogen, J. Kates, Nancy Naomi Carlson, Gabriella Bedetti

This panel convenes members of the Trans Studies Research Cluster at the University of Arizona who work in and across multiple languages and material spaces. Our conversation centers on the concept of inversion, a term once used to designate gender dissidence in the United States, to think of how various versions relate to working with multiple languages in the context of trans, queer, and feminist studies. We will play with in/versions of time, place, and language, and focus on utterance, text and metadata in archival spaces, cruising grounds and oral/stories.

Moderator: Reid Gómez

Panelists: Diego Jose Lopez, Taylor Marie Doherty, Liz Rose

We are a group of American and Romanian poets, translators, architecture historians, and fiction writers who formed a group of writers in and about Bucharest in the summer of 2024. Our panel will explore the challenges and creative possibilities of being a 21st century flaneur in Eastern Europe. We will discuss what a city narrative is in the 21st century, what makes it unique and urgent in places of political and cultural transition such as Eastern Europe. How do we create both individual and collaborative work for the project through translation, multigenre, and multilingual writing in a workshop environment? How does the city change between English and Romanian, what does one language add to the other? Where does the Levantine spirit end and Europe begins?

Moderator: Anca Roncea

Panelists: Rajnesh Chakrapani, Monica Cure, Mina Decu

Not every literary culture has the same approach to editing. In many South Asian publishing houses, works are edited lightly at best before they are sent to the printer. This situation creates problems for translating the texts into English, a literary culture with a robust editing tradition. Many translators end up acting as both editor and translator for the original work, cleaning up continuity errors, rearranging paragraphs, and sneaking in occasional sentences. In the process, they agonize over whether they are hegemonizing already colonized languages and cultures with the bulldozer of English editing. In this panel, we will ruminate upon the boundaries between translator/writer/editor and ask ourselves how much editing we should take on and for whom and why.

Moderator: Daisy Rockwell

Panelists: Jenny Bhatt, Sana Chaudhry, Shabnam Nadiya, Haider Shahbaz

In this panel we will explore the translator’s role as re-interpreter. Talebi will discuss bringing A Shamlou’s dense, symbol-laden poetry into a language where his historical and cultural references are unfamiliar. Schnee will discuss the Nahuatl words and Aztec references in JL Clariond’s poetry and the choice to provide a glossary for readers. Charette will discuss the process of bringing Naivo’s Malagasy novel into English from French, working with the author to remove some of the French bridges between the Malagasy concepts and her translation. Woodward will discuss working with a musician to extend A Rosselli’s poetry into 41 micro compositions. Greene will share his experience creating interactive transfluxions of poems from Y Melchy’s decade-long project, THE NEW WORLD.

Moderator: samantha schnee

Panelists: Niloufar Talebi, Deborah Woodard, Allison Charrette, Ryan Greene

In this panel, we build on Lawrence Venuti’s advocacy for the visibility of the translator and look at how much we transform the source text into our own version of what it might be. We discuss how closely the translator’s vision of the translated text has to align with the author’s vision of the source text. Do we apply a standard vision to every author and text we translate or does the research we do about the author and the particular text influence our approach to the translation of this particular text? Further, do our collaborations with living authors produce dialogic influences to recast how both translator and author “see” the text at hand? To answer these questions, we discuss visions of works by diverse writers from Cuba, Peru, Norway, Galicia, Venezuela, Mexico, and Chile.

Moderator: Lau Cesarco Eglin

Panelists: Kristin Dykstra, Arthur Malcolm Dixon, Farid Matuk, Gabriel Gudding

Sponsored by LTI Korea

This panel will explore how Cho Yeeun and Woo Dayoung, two contemporary Korean women writers, are rewriting the speculative fiction canon and using horror and surrealism to reimagine the past and foretell apocalyptic futures. While their work differs stylistically, both writers are preoccupied with ethics, whether environmental destruction or gendered and colonial violence as in Cho’s Cocktail, Love, Zombie and The Haunting of the Enemy’s House, or the philosophical questions of how to live a moral life as in Woo’s And If You Call Alice, Alice and But Surely There are Those Who Want a Darker Night. The panelists will discuss how these genre elements inform the writing and translation of these works.

Moderator: Paige Aniyah Morris

Panelists: Hannah Kim, Woo Dayoung, Giulia Ratti

This workshop invites literary translators to explore digital tools to clear the way toward creativity. So much of translation isn’t just translating—drafting project summaries, submitting to journals, tracking rejections, setting goals, and organizing timelines. Beginning with ethical considerations around AI and automation, we’ll guide participants in setting up a flexible “translator’s workstation” using tech tools to reduce friction around administrative tasks and support reflection to clarify next steps and name what you’re really working through. Bring your laptop, your questions, and a list of things you’ve been avoiding. You’ll leave with templates, new ideas, and a more sustainable relationship to your practice. No prior tech experience necessary. This is a space for experimentation.

Leaders: Ahry Jeon, Stine An

From the leaders: In advance of the workshop, Stine and Ahry would love to hear about how you work, what tools you use or avoid, and what you’d find most helpful through this survey. The form is anonymous, but feel free to leave your name if you’d like them to get back to your comments/questions! They want to tailor the workshop based on the community’s interests and goals.

“Everything is pereklad [translation]” (the theme of a recent Ukrainian literary festival) suggests that there are many ways beyond “translation proper” to get people’s brains thinking toward translation. This workshop aims to bring together translators and teachers to share their most exciting translation- and translation-adjacent exercises for all kinds of classroom settings and workshops (k-12, university level, community workshops, and more). Ideally we will hear about successful experiments from all participants and brainstorm new ones together.

Leaders: Ainsley Morse, Amelia Glaser

Translation is a craft of constraints. A successful translator is adept at operating within the linguistic, genre, political, contextual, aesthetic (etc) constraints of their source text, and using these to the benefit of their translation.
Using form-bound, experimental Icelandic poetry as a springboard, this workshop explores constraint as an opportunity for creativity. Translating from a language unfamiliar to most (if not all) participants, we will produce dramatically different versions of the same text, compare our choices, and appreciate firsthand the expansive possibilities inherent in our craft.
No specific language proficiency is required. Participants will get a gloss of the original poem and may translate into English or another language, either alone or collaboratively.

Leader: Larissa Kyzer

Anxious and confused when a contract hits your inbox? Mad but unsure what to do about that publisher who hasn’t paid? Tongue-tied when it comes to asking for more money? Come join the Solidarity Drop-in, brought to you by the NWU Translators Organizing Committee, created to organize for better working conditions for literary translators. Our drop-ins are a space to ask questions, support one another, and share grievances. Remember: We are stronger together.

Leaders: Allison Markin Powell, Marianna Suleymanova

In workshop format, all attending will discuss the means by which we tun the ear for translation and in translation. Can a sensitive ear be acquired, or at least refined? What reading might aid in this process? The subject is difficult, but perhaps not entirely subjective. The two leaders have given much thought to the role of the ear in writing, and although their poetry and translation practices differ widely–they have acquired a wealth of experience and are eager to compare notes, and discuss the work you bring. Please bring a dozen copies of both your original and your translation to share. What makes a translation sing? Be ready to comment. Or come listen!

Leaders: James Kates, Mary Jane White

When we design homes for texts in multiple languages, no formal choice is neutral. Questions of politics, aesthetics, and access all intermix. In Tongue-Twist, we’ll dive into the beautifully-tangled weeds of multilingual design by collectively mapping strategies from the well-worn (e.g. face-to-face layout) to the less-expected (e.g. interactive web projects). As workshop leaders with experience in bookmaking and creative coding we’ll offer a preliminary taxonomy of design strategies and share representative books, zines, and net-art projects. We’ll then facilitate a group brainstorm to identify additional strategies and co-imagine untested possibilities. We hope this workshop will energize translators to enter new collaborations as they explore new forms and publishing strategies.

Leaders: Ryan Greene, Kathy Wu