In(ter)vention: Translation and Makings of Poetics, Politics, Place, Part 1

Through works ranging from avant-garde poetry to Black feminist thought, and creative strategies from invented words to invented authors, we ask: how can translation combat underrepresentation? What is the translator’s role in hegemonic spaces? How do we cross, redraw, or erase borders beyond the linguistic and geographic? What does it mean to think of border languages as translated spaces? How do the materials that constitute translation—such as sound, paratext, found texts—fit into the ecology of a work? Part One centers on the politics of translating from and into Latin American languages.

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Moderator

Olivia Lott is the translator of Lucía Estrada’s Katabasis (forthcoming, Eulalia Books), the co-translator of Soleida Ríos’s The Dirty Text (2018, Kenning Editions), and the curator of “Poesía en acción” on the Action Books blog. She is ABD in Hispanic Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

Presenters

Jeannine M. Pitas is a translator, writer, and teacher living in Dubuque. Her most recent translation, We Do Not Live In Vain by Uruguayan poet Selva Casal, is forthcoming from Veliz Books. Her translation of I Remember Nightfall by Marosa di Giorgio (Ugly Duckling, 2017) was shortlisted for the National Translation Award. She is translation coeditor for Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry. Laura Cesarco Eglin co-translated Fabián Severo’s Night in the North (Eulalia Books). Her translation of Hilda Hilst’s Of Death. Minimal Odes (co•im•press) won the 2019 Best Translated Book Award. She is the author of Life, One Not Attached to Conditionals (Thirty West Publishing House) and the publisher of Veliz Books. Jamille Pinheiro Dias is a scholar and translator born in Belém, in the Brazilian Amazon, in 1983. She is currently a Research Associate at the University of Manchester and has had previous appointments at Stanford University and University of São Paulo, where she received a PhD in Modern Languages. She is interested on Indigenous arts and activism in Latin America, with a focus on Brazil.