ALTA45 Panel: Shared Book, Shared Values A Collaboration View of Translation

This panel, which features Uruguayan poet Silvia Guerra, co-translators Jesse Lee Kercheval and Jeannine Marie Pitas, and her Eulalia Books publisher Michelle Gil-Montero, will explore an alternative model, one that values personal connection, sees translation as a collaborative act between a poet, translators, editor. We will discuss both process and the values that were important throughout the translation of Guerra’s A Sea at Dawn: curiosity, growth, humor, teamwork, and friendship.

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Moderator

Jesse Lee Kercheval is a writer and translator, specializing in Uruguayan poetry. Her translations include Love Poems by Idea Vilariño and The Invisible Bridge: Selected Poems of Circe Maia, for which she awarded an NEA in Translation, both from the University of Pittsburgh Press. She is the Zona Gale Professor Emerita at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Panelists

Jeannine Marie Pitas’s translations of the Uruguayan poet Marosa di Giorgio include The History of Violets and I Remember Nightfall, and Carnation and Tenebrae Candle. Her other translations include We Do Not Live In Vain (Veliz Books, 2020) by Uruguayan poet Selva Casal. Her co-translation, with Jesse Lee Kercheval, of A Sea at Dawn by the Uruguayan poet Silvia Guerra is forthcoming from Eulalia Books. Silvia Guerra (1961, Maldonado, Uruguay) is an Uruguayan poet, critic and editor. Her selected poems Un mar en madrugado / A Sea at Dawn, translated by Jesse Lee Kercheval and Jeannine Pitas, is forthcoming from Eulalia Books. Michelle Gil-Montero translates contemporary Latin-American poetry, fiction, and criticism. Her work has been supported by an NEA Literature Fellowship in Literary Translation, a Howard Foundation grant, a PEN/Heim Translation Fellowship, and a Fulbright US Scholars Grant. She teaches at Saint Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania.