In(ter)vention: Translation and Makings of Poetics, Politics, Place, Part 2

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 Two centers on materialist and experimental poetics and translating place-based work.

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Moderator

Michelle Gil-Montero has translated several books of contemporary Latin American writing, including Edinburgh Notebook by Valerie Mejer Caso (Action Books) and Berlin Interlude (Black Square Editions) by María Negroni, both forthcoming. She is the author of Object Permanence (Ornithopter Press, 2020) and publisher of Eulalia Books.

Presenters

Rebecca Kosick is a Lecturer in Translation at the University of Bristol, where she codirects the Bristol Poetry Institute. She is author of Labor Day (Golias Books) and Material Poetics in Hemispheric America: Words and Objects, 1950-2010 (Edinburgh). Her research addresses interrelations among poetry, art, and translation in the Americas. Ezequiel Zaidenwerg is an Argentinian poet, translator, and cultural critic. His most recent book is 50 estados: 13 poetas contemporáneos de Estados Unidos, a novelized anthology of recent American poetry. He translates a poem a day atzaidenwerg.com, produces the podcast series “Orden de traslado,” and writes about poetry, translation, and politics for El Malpensante. Janet Hendrickson’s experimental translation of a 1611 dictionary, Sebastián de Covarrubias’s Treasure of the Castilian or Spanish Language (New Directions), was longlisted for the 2020 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. She also translated The Future Is Not Ours (Open Letter) and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow of Spanish at the University of Dallas.