ALTA47
ALTA's 47th annual conference took place October 25-28, 2024 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Location
Hyatt Regency in Milwaukee, WIALT47 conference programs were framed by the multifaceted concept of “voices in translation. In this context, “voice” encompasses not only the spoken, unspoken, signed, or written expression, but also the nuanced layers of identity, perspective, and agency that emerge through the act of translation, including questions such as: How can translators render, amplify, and honor voices across linguistic and cultural boundaries? What are translators’ responsibilities as they encounter voices within these boundaries, and what happens if the boundaries are transgressed?
Over four days approximately 400 translators and editors from our membership community and beyond convened in a robust yet intimate gathering for panels, workshops, readings, receptions and other offerings.
The conference also featured ALTA’s Awards Ceremony and reception where the winners of the National Translation Awards in Poetry and Prose, Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize, Italian Prose in Translation Award, Spain-USA Foundation Translation Award, and ALTA First Translation Prize are announced; readings from ALTA Travel Fellows and ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorship participants; a small publishers bookfair, and Declamación, a night of performance featuring the recitation of literary translations from memory (more or less!), among other onsite and offsite events.
Keynote Address
The ALTA47 keynote address was delivered by Kaiama L. Glover, author, professor of African American Studies and French at Yale University, and translator of Haitian prose fiction and francophone non-fiction. Glover is the author of A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being (Duke University Press) and Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon (Liverpool University Press), as well as of numerous essays, articles, and chapters concerning race, gender, and representation in the francophone world. She is currently at work on a biography titled “For the Love of Revolution: René Depestre and the Poetics of a Radical Life” (forthcoming with Liveright/Norton).
Professor Glover is the prize-winning translator of several works of Haitian prose fiction – notably, Frankétienne’s Ready to Burst, Marie Chauvet’s Dance on the Volcano, Yanick Lahens’s Sweet Undoings, and René Depestre’s Hadriana in All My Dreams and Popa Singer – and of francophone non-fiction, including Françoise Vergès’s The Wombs of Women: Capitalism, Racialization, and Feminism, Maboula Soumahoro’s Black is the Journey, Africana the Name, and Audrey Celestine’s A French Family. She has written articles on translation for Esprit Créateur and PMLA, and has been developing a collection of essays tentatively titled “Race Matters in Translation.” Whether translating or writing about the process, she delights in the intimacies made possible by bringing two language-worlds into relation.
In addition to academic writing and translation, Kaiama is the founding co-editor of archipelagos | a journal of Caribbean digital praxis and the founding co-director of the digital humanities project In the Same Boats: Toward an Afro-Atlantic Intellectual Cartography. She has also been a contributor to the New York Times Book Review, the co-host of the podcast WRITING HOME | American Voices from the Caribbean, and a presenter on shows for both PBS and the History Channel.
Her various scholarly, translation, and digital humanities work has been generously supported by fellowships and awards from the New York Public Library Cullman Center, the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris, the PEN/Heim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation.
