Video as Intermediary: Translators on the Joys of Video Texts

Whether it’s Basque video poems, bilingual Persian-English new poetry as video-poems and performance, a bilingual Hebrew-English translation video for National Poetry Month, or an entire reading series devoted to women writers in translation now floating in virtual video space, the results have been exciting. Translators will discuss the challenges of video texts, differences in translation for the page versus performance, as well as the special joys and advantages of this form, with a focus on how video can increase a translator’s reach.

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Moderator

Aviya Kushner is the author of The Grammar of God and the forthcoming Wolf Lamb Bomb. She is The Forward’s language columnist, Associate Professor at Columbia College Chicago, and an ALTA board member. She translates Hebrew poetry and prose, and is part of Chicago’s Third Coast Translators Collective.

Panelists

Amaia Gabantxo is a writer, singer, and award-winning translator specialized in Basque literature. Her translation of Unai Elorriaga’s Old Dogs, Old Bones is forthcoming with Archipelago Books, and she’s editing and translating an anthology of Basque female poets for Parthian. Her album KANTUZ: 1931 was released in 2019. Larissa Kyzer is a writer and Icelandic literary translator. In 2019, she was Princeton University’s fall Translator in Residence and was awarded the American Scandinavian Foundation’s Nadia Christensen prize for her translation of Kristín Eiríksdóttir’s A Fist or a Heart. Larissa co-chairs PEN America’s Translation Committee and runs the Women+ in Translation reading series Jill! Niloufar Talebi is an author, award-winning translator, and multidisciplinary artist. Cultural translation projects: editing/translating an anthology of contemporary Iranian poetry; Self-Portrait in Bloom, her hybrid memoir including poetry by Nobel-prize nominated Iranian poet, Ahmad Shamlou; operas and poetry theater. She has translated over 20 authors from the Persian.