ALTA45 Roundtable Literary Translation in Mexico, Canada and the United States

Format: Each participant will describe an aspect of what their association does.

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Organizers

Ellen Elias-Bursac translates fiction and non-fiction from the Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian. She is currently serving as interim president on the ALTA Board. Bilal Hashmi is President of the Literary Translators’ Association of Canada/Association des traducteurs et traductrices littéraires du Canada and the Executive Director and Publisher of Quattro Books. He teaches Urdu at the University of Toronto. In 2020 he served on the faculty of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre. Arturo Vazquez Barron is President of the Asociación Mexicana de Traductores Literarios, and translates from French and English into Spanish. As a freelance literary translator, he translates for various publishing houses and periodicals. He has translated and published, among others, Albert Camus, Jean Cocteau, Pierre Michon, Bernard Noël, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Annie Saumont, Michel Tournier and Marguerite Yourcenar.

Participants

Alex Olvera is a visual communicator, translator, and promoter of Scandinavian languages and literatures. She discovered translation through a happy accident almost 15 years ago and has not parted with it ever since. From 2014 to 2016 she specialized in audiovisual translation (METAV; Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), without taking her eyes off traditional literary texts and, later, she took some courses within the framework of the Diploma in Literary and Humanistic Translation at Ametli. She has participated in conferences and book fairs in Mexico and Scandinavia and hopes to continue building bridges between readers and authors on both sides of the Atlantic… and the Pacific. She has combined her translation activity with teaching, teaching dubbing translation classes at the university level, and she is an expert translator authorized by the Federal Judiciary for Swedish and Danish in Mexico. Amaia Gabantxo is a writer, a flamenco singer, and literary translator specialized in Basque literature. She is the most prolific translator of Basque literature to date, as well as a pioneer in the field, and has received multiple awards for her work; among them, a Wingate Scholarship, the OMI Writers Translation Lab award, a Mellon Fellowship for Arts and Scholarship, and an artist-in-residence award at the Cervantes Institute in Chicago. D.P. Snyder is a bilingual writer, translator, critic, and contributor to Reading in Translation. Her first book-length translation is Meaty Pleasures (Katakana Editores 2021), stories by Mónica Lavín (Mexico). Her translation of Arrhythmias by the decorated Mexican writer Angelina Muñiz-Huberman will be released by Literal Publishing in fall-winter 2022. Daniel Casado is a literary translator and essayist. He has a degree in Language and Modern Literatures (English Literature) from the UNAM and an MA in Translation from El Colegio de México. He completed the Diploma in Literary and Humanistic Translation at Ametli and the Language-Culture Teacher Training Course at the National School of Languages, Linguistics and Translation at UNAM. He was a fellow at the Papime Project “Critical studies on popular genres” from 2014 to 2015. He has collaborated in various publications with creative literary texts. He is currently deputy coordinator of Mentoring in the Board of Directors of Ametli. Emilie Lafleur is a Montreal-based writer, currently studying English and Creative Writing at Concordia. She enjoys connecting with people by checking their horoscopes instead of actually interacting with them. Leticia Garcia has been a literary translator for more than 30 years. Her area of specialty is the humanistic essay and topics of politics and history. She has more than 15 published books. She has published for various publishers, including Alfaguara, the Publications Department and the Literature Department of the UNAM and the Fund for Economic Culture where she published, among other titles, Politics and Perspective, Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought by Sheldon S. Wolin and The Faces of Erick Fromm: A Biography by Lawrence J. Freeman. She has been a trainer of translators at the Intercontinental University, the Ibero-American University, and currently teaches the subject of Literary Translation in the Diploma in Humanistic and Literary Translation of Ametli. She is coordinator of the Editorial Management and Co-edition portfolio of Ametli. Samantha Schnee is the founding editor of Words Without Borders. Her translation of Jeannette Clariond’s Goddesses of Water was published by World Poetry Editions in September and featured in the Summer 2021 issue of Modern Poetry in Translation. Her translation of Carmen Boullosa’s Texas: The Great Theft was shortlisted for the PEN America Translation Prize in 2015 and her translation of Boullosa’s El libro de Eva, which was shortlisted for the Mario Vargas Llosa Biennial Novel Prize, will be published by Deep Vellum in 2023. Sean Gasper Bye is a translator of Polish literature. He has been a winner of the EBRD Literature Prize and Translator-in-Residence at Princeton University. He lives in Philadelphia. Reader, translator, and incubator of ideas, Sonya Malaborza takes pleasure in supporting authors and translators in the exercise of their profession, in particular for the magazine Ancrages, where she has contributed since 2017 to the edition of contents. Susan Ouriou is an award-winning literary translator and fiction writer who has translated over 60 works of fiction and nonfiction from French and Spanish. She has won Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation and has been shortlisted on four other occasions for that same award, most recently in 2021 for The Lover, the Lake by Virginia Pesemapeo-Bordeleau. Many of her translations have appeared on annual IBBY (International Board of Books for Youth) honor lists. She has worked as director of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre and as faculty for the Banff Centre’s Indigenous Emerging Writers residency. She was also editor of the trilingual anthology Beyond Words – Translating the World and the bilingual anthology Languages of Our Land – Indigenous Poems and Stories from Quebec. Currently, she is working on numerous translations, a novel and a play co-written with a collective of women artists.