ALTA45 Bilingual Reading Series: Women in Translation (August)

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. For the August reading, we welcomed works of any genre written by a woman, and translated into English by a translator (or translators) of any gender.

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Moderator

Kelsi Vanada joined ALTA as Program Manager in July 2018. She is a poet and translator. She has published a chapbook, Rare Earth. Her translations include: Damascus, Atlantis: Selected Poems by Marie Silkeberg and The Eligible Age by Berta García Faet. Kelsi holds MFAs in Poetry (The Iowa Writers’ Workshop) and Literary Translation (The University of Iowa). She was a 2016 ALTA Travel Fellow. She enjoys building a readership for literature in translation by writing reviews and teaching occasional translation classes.

Readers

Laura Nagle read from My Bespoke Life by Monique Debruxelles (fiction), translated from French. Monique Debruxelles is the author of four short story collections and co-author of three crime novels. Retired from a career in the civil service, she lives in a suburb of Paris. Her fiction is appearing for the first time in English in 2022, in The Southern Review. “My Bespoke Life” (“La vie cousue main”) tells the story of a young woman whose obsession with an unusual painting prompts her to enter into a disastrous marriage and a criminal conspiracy. Laura Nagle, a 2020 ALTA Travel Fellow, is a translator and writer based in Indianapolis. Her translations of prose and poetry from French and Spanish have recently appeared or are forthcoming in journals including AGNI, The Southern Review, and The Los Angeles Review. Martha Kosir read poetry by Alja Adam, translated from Slovenian. Alja Adam (1976) is a poet, literary critic, and Gestalt psychotherapist. She graduated from the University of Ljubljana with a degree in Comparative Literature and Sociology of Culture. She earned her doctorate in 2007 in Gender Studies and Feminist Literary Theory, likewise from the University of Ljubljana. Her poems have been translated into thirteen languages and have appeared in diverse publications and anthologies in Slovenia and abroad. She is considered one of the most prominent Slovenian authors of her generation. Martha Kosir, Ph.D., translates poetry from English into Spanish, and from Slovenian into English and Spanish. She has also translated poetry from German into English and Spanish. Her translations have been published in Sirena: Poetry, Art and Criticism; Contemporary Slovenian Poetry; The International Poetry Review; The Drunken Boat; Plume, Solstice; Source, and SlavFile. Adriana Jacobs read poems from Avarice by Tahel Frosh, translated from Hebrew. Tahel Frosh’s debut poetry collection Avarice (2014) examines how Israel’s neoliberal economic policies have shaped Israeli lives for better or for worse. Shifting between constraint and excess, the poems of Avarice address the place and value of the arts in a society facing rising housing costs, the increased cost of living, and a widening gap between the rich and poor. Adriana X. Jacobs is a poet, scholar, and translator based in Oxford and New York City. Her translations of Hebrew poetry include Vaan Nguyen’s The Truffle Eye (Zephyr Press)- for which she received a 2015 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, and Merav Givoni Hrushovski’s End– (Carrion Bloom Books). She was awarded a 2020 NEA Translation Fellowship for Tahel Frosh’s Avarice. Cynthia Hogue read from Distantly by Nicole Brossard (poetry), translated from French. Nicole Brossard, known for her elliptical and materially grounded poetics, creates in Distantly an intimate series based loosely on urban experience. The poems are linked by their city settings, drawn from a woman’s observations, emotions, perceptions, and dreams as she wanders the streets of her world. The cities of the individual poem titles are evocatively conjured rather than realistically described. These poems distill modern urban life through their sharp flash sketches of cultural and gendered histories of violence and beauty, personal and shared struggles for survival and intimacy. Distantly expresses a redolently postmodern sensibility, at once utopian and real. Cynthia Hogue’s most recent collections are Revenance and In June the Labyrinth. Her co-translations include Fortino Sámano (The overflowing of the poem), from the French of Virginie Lalucq and Jean-Luc Nancy, which won the Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. Hogue’s honors include two NEA Fellowships. Jenna Tang read from Lin Yi-Han’s Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise (Fiction), translated from Mandarin Chinese. Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise is a well-known Taiwanese feminist novel,narrating the stories through deep stream of consciousness, bringing thesociety’s attention to the importance of #MeToo movement to reflect on topicsof sexual violence and the very internal sense of belonging. It is one of themost influential novels in Taiwan since 2017 and has to date been translated tovarious languages. Jenna Tang is a Taiwanese writer and literary translator based in New York. She translates from Chinese, French, and Spanish. Her translations or essays are published in Restless Books, World Literature Today, AAWW, Catapult, Mcsweeney’s and elsewhere. She is one of the selected translators for the 2021 ALTA Emerging Translators Mentorship program with a focus on Taiwanese prose. Miriam Adelman read Now that I am no longer a horse by Germaine Calderón (poetry), translated from Spanish. Many years ago I found the poem, “Ya no soy un caballo” by Germaine Calderón, in Mexico City’s La Jornada daily newspaper. I carried it – a flimsy newspaper clipping thrown into a manilla folder – over years of continent-crossings: from Mexico City to New York and then to Curitiba, Brazil. In recent decades, I have largely been devoted to English to Portuguese translations of women poets whose work I felt the urgency to share with Brazilian friends and students – from Beat Poets di Prima, Hettie Jones and Lenore Kandell to Sandra Cisneros and Natalie Diaz – but Calderon’s poem, never forgotten, came back to me one day, calling for this attempt at Spanish-English translation. Miriam Adelman is a poet and translator, retired university professor, born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1955, and living in Curitiba, Paraná, Brazil, since 1991. During the pandemic, she published two books: Found in Translation, her own bilingual poetry collection, and a Portuguese language version of Denise Duhamel’s Kinky (published in Brazil under the title Mundo Barbie).