The Translator’s Personal Experience

Participants will share with attendees—prompting them to chime in—the realities of the literary translator’s life: how the translator lives the experience of “in-betweenness” as a translator.

The accent is on the personal: our lives as literary translators. What is the day’s organization like? What works best for the translator? How does writing a translation compare to writing one’s own original fiction, nonfiction, and poetry? Does participating in a writer’s critique group work for a translator? What status do translators have in the literary community? What effect does gender/race/ethnicity/disability/age/sexual orientation/religion have on the literary translator’s practice? How do translators present themselves to the general public, and to non-translators in particular?

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Moderator

Marguerite Feitlowitz, author of A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture, translates from Spanish and French, most recently Small Bibles for Bad Times: Selected Prose and Poetry by Liliane Atlan. A current NEA Fellow in Translation, she is working on two books by Chilean poet Ennio Moltedo.

Presenters

Lisa Rose Bradford—poet, translator, songwriter, and rancher—teaches Comparative Literature at the Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata, Argentina. Recipient of the National Translation Award, she recently published her fifth bilingual collection of Juan Gelman’s poetry, Today/Hoyand is presently working on a sixth, In Foreign Rain.

Atar Hadari’s Songs from Bialik: Selected Poems of H. N. Bialik (Syracuse University Press) was a finalist for the American Literary Translators’ Association Award, and his own Rembrandt’s Bible was published by Indigo Dreams. His Pen Translates Award-winning Lives of the Dead: Collected Poems of Hanoch Levin is out now from Arc Publications.

Mark Schafer is a translator, visual artist, and Senior Lecturer in Spanish at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He has completed a revised/new translation of Gloria Gervitz’s Migraciones: 1976–2020, and is translating Belén Gopegui and David Huerta. He’s a founding member of the Boston Area Literary Translators Group.