ALTA45 Bilingual Reading Series: Multigenre Potpourri (April)

ALTA’s Annual Alexis Levitin Bilingual Readings are a celebration of the work of our community.

Readers typically read for a few minutes in the an original language of the text they have translated, and then read in their English translation.

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Canaan Morse read from Ge Fei’s The Moon Sets Over the Temple That Was, translated from Chinese. The Moon Sets Over the Temple That Was is a new prequel to Ge Fei’s 2010 novel The Invisibility Cloak. It follows Lin Yisheng, a successful public intellectual struggling to raise his son as a single parent while navigating relationships with his friends, who are members of an influential yet ethically unmoored upper class in post-power China. When Lin Yisheng’s new love interest becomes enmeshed in her brother’s dangerous lifestyle, Yisheng faces a brutality that never goes out of style. Canaan Morse is a literary translator and poet whose translations of Chinese prose and poetry have appeared in Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, The Baffler, and many other journals. His recent translation of Ge Fei’s novel Peach Blossom Paradise was a Finalist for a 2021 National Book Award. Ann Kaiser read poems from Unnameable by Anna Gual, translated from Catalan, together with the author. In the world of Catalan literature, Ms. Gual has proven herself time and time again as one of Catalunya’s most vital poetic voices. Her work presents a rare literary jewel to her generation, and for all of us. Her exploration of the minute to the exponential, the daily to the eternal, and the unique and unexpected ways she writes this exploration, continues to surprise, to draw in readers, and critics. I will be sharing a selection of poems from Unnameable, a collected work spanning the first twelve years of her published poetry for which I have received an NEA Fellowship. AKaiser, PhD, NEA Fellow for her translations of Catalan poet Anna Gual, is a Pushcart-nominated poet and author of glint. Poems from manuscript, trace, have won and placed as finalist for prizes, including with Poetry International. Recent poems and photos appear in Amsterdam Quarterly, New Square, and In Print No.5. Anna Gual is one of the freshest and most ground-breaking voices in present-day Catalan literature. She is a prolific writer – and reader – of consistently prize-winning poetry collections which have been translated into several languages. With the support of an NEA Fellowship, poet and translator AKaiser is translating Gual’s Unnameable. Giada Biasetti read from Silvana Marconi’s Sobrevivi: Mi historia de violencia doméstica, translated from Spanish, together with Lucinda Clark. Students in Spanish 4600 translated Sobrevivi: Mi historia de violencia doméstica by Uruguayan author Silvana Marconi. The topic of the book focuses on the author’s experience with domestic violence and the obiective of the translation project is to reach a wider audience and increase awareness on this important topic. Giada Biasetti is Associate Professor of Spanish in the Department of English and World Languages and she is the Director of the World Languages Program as well as Director of the Spain Study Abroad Program at Augusta University. In 2018, she won the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese Professor of the Year Award (Georgia Chapter). Lucinda Clark is poet, publisher, and film producer. She is the founder of the Poetry Matters Project, which was her proudest achievement until she produced her first short film with her son last year. Clark is a contributor of View From The Middle of the Road Series and publisher of Poetry Diversified: An Anthology of Human Experience. She is also the VP of Georgia Poetry Society. Yardenne Greenspan read from Shimon Adaf’s A Detective’s Complaint, translated from Hebrew. Elish, a retired private detective turned detective novel writer, travels to the border town of Sderot in the summer of 2014, the heart of the Gaza–Israel conflict, when missile strikes and violent clashes between staunch militants and anti-war protestors are part of the town’s daily reality, to help his niece, Tahel, who has uncovered a mystery–a young woman boarded a bus in Beersheva on a Thursday evening and stepped off in Sderot Sunday evening. A bus ride that should have lasted an hour instead took three days, and the young woman remembers none of it. Yardenne Greenspan is a writer and Hebrew translator born in Tel Aviv and based in New York. Her translations have been published by Restless Books, St. Martin’s Press, Akashic, Syracuse University, New Vessel Press, Amazon Crossing, and Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Her translation of Yishai Sarid’s novel The Memory Monster was selected as one of The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2020.