Literature Off the Beaten Track, Part 1

The sociopolitical agenda of the day, or very different attitudes toward religion in the source culture, can make a text awkward in the target language. Avant-garde movements that have never been translated before can feel alien in English. Do such factors affect the choice of writers/texts that we translate? What literary expectations do we uphold as we translate a newly discovered prose writer or poet? And how do we go about publishing a text that feels far away from contemporary fashions in English? Format: Organizers will circulate brief samples that are at odds with current publication trends. Participants will also be asked to bring their own examples. The goal is to better understand what makes a less-visible text, and share strategies for translation and dissemination.

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Organizers

Anna Halberstadt is a poet and translator from Russian, Lithuanian, and English. She published four collections in English. Her translation awards include Translator of the Year 2017 (Persona PLUS journal). Her book of poems in Lithuanian translation, Transit, was named a TOP15 poetry book of 2020 by Lt.15. Olga Livshin is the author of the poetry collection A Life Replaced: Poets and Translations from Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Gandelsman (Poets & Traitors Press, 2019). Her poems, essays, and translations appear in the Kenyon Review Online, Poetry International, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and other journals. She lives outside Philadelphia.

Participants

Margaret Besser is an American translator and writer based in Geneva, Switzerland. Her prose translations from French have appeared in Words Without Borders and The Common, and she regularly translates and edits translations of comics and graphic novels for the Europe Comics imprint as M. B. Valente. Mindl Cohen is Academic Director of the Yiddish Book Center (Amherst, MA). She directs a fellowship program for Yiddish literary translators and edits an annual anthology of new translations from Yiddish. She has a PhD in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley and translates from–you guessed it–Yiddish. Henry Gifford is an emerging translator from German, a relatively emerged copyeditor, and a plain old writer. Work can be found at Asymptote and Lapham’s Quarterly. Anushka Sen is an Indian international PhD candidate in English at Indiana University, Bloomington. She translates from Bengali, her native language. She is most drawn to the minutiae and cadences of poetry but has recently ventured into the wide-open field of fiction. Her interest in 20th-century literature draws her to the “Literature Off the Beaten Track” roundtable on the nuances of translating non-contemporary texts. Slava Faybysh translates from Russian and Spanish. AK Press recently published his first translation, called The July Revolution: Barcelona 1909. Next year, the Song Bridge Project will publish his second translation, a 1931 novel called I Want to Live My Life, by Carmen de Burgos.