What are National Literatures? Part 2

What do we mean when we say “French,” “Italian,” or “Peruvian” literature? Are there themes these literatures are thought to address? Why must the reader type “immigrant,” “post-colonial,” or “exile” into Google to find writers who speak about national and international traumas? As translators of writers whose sense of national belonging is complicated or contested, we aim to ask generative questions about how we name and label. We also want to ask ourselves: How do we frame the work we’re translating so that it’s legible to target readers, but also reflective of how the writers see themselves and their work? Format: We welcome all those interested to this session of collective exploration, including, but not limited to: agents, editors, people with a complicated sense of national belonging, representatives from cultural institutions, reviewers, and translators.

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Organizers

Jennifer Shyue is a translator focusing on contemporary Cuban and Asian-Peruvian writers. Her work has received support from Cornell’s ICM, Fulbright, Princeton, and the University of Iowa and has appeared in The Margins, The Offing, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. Her translation of Julia Wong Kcomt’s Vice-royal-ties is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse. Find her at www.shyue.co. Emma Ramadan is a literary translator of works from French. She is the recipient of the PEN Translation Prize, the Albertine Prize, an NEA Translation Fellowship, and a Fulbright. Her translations include Abdellah Taïa’s A Country for Dying, Meryem Alaoui’s Straight From the Horse’s Mouth, Kamel Daoud’s Zabor, or the Psalms, and most recently, Anne Garréta’s In Concrete. Candice Whitney is a translator, writer, and international-education professional based in New Jersey. In 2016-17, as a Fulbright Scholar, she researched how African women’s entrepreneurial projects interrogates and challenges stereotypes about the African diaspora in Italy. She has curated events and spoken about literature, Blackness, and Italy for universities and cultural institutions.

Participants

Yilin Wang (she/they) is a writer, editor, and Chinese-English translator. Her translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Asymptote, Samovar, Pathlight, China Channel, and the anthology The Way Spring Arrives (Tor.com). Their writing has appeared in Clarkesworld, Fantasy Magazine, and Words Without Borders, and been longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize. Evan McGorray is a non-binary literary translator passionate about Francophone authors who celebrate gender variance and queer experiences. Based out of Cleveland, OH, when Evan is not translating queer fiction, memoirs, and comics, they help part-time translating a chatbot A.I. into French. Sharon Fish Mooney authored Bending Toward Heaven, Poems After the Art of Vincent van Gogh (2016), and edited A Rustling and Waking Within (2017), an anthology of ekphrastic poetry. She won the inaugural Frost Farm Prize for metrical poetry. Her French poetry translations have appeared in Delos and Transference. Shelley Fairweather-Vega is a professional translator of Russian and Uzbek in Seattle, Washington. She translates poetry, fiction, screenplays, and also completely non-creative work, with a special focus on the contemporary literature of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, especially stories that highlight the intersection of culture and politics in recent history. Jeffrey Zuckerman translates French, including books by the Mauritian novelists Ananda Devi, Shenaz Patel, and Carl de Souza, and the Tahitian enfant terrible Titaua Peu. A finalist for the French-American Foundation Translation Prize, he has received a PEN/Heim translation grant and the French Voices Grand Prize. Quyen Nguyen-Hoang is a writer and translator based in Vietnam. Whitney DeVos is the translator of Notes Toward a Pamphlet by Sergio Chejfec and The Semblable by Chantal Maillard (Ugly Duckling, 2020). Her short-form translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Columbia Journal, AGNI, FULL STOP, Copper Nickel, Latin American Literature Today, and elsewhere. An assistant poetry editor at Asymptote, she lives in Mexico City. Lynn Palermo, Associate Professor of French Studies at Susquehanna University, is the translator of the novel Humus by Fabienne Kanor, as well as short works by Sylvie Weil, Cyrille Fleischman, and Kettly Mars. She is the recipient of an NEA translation grant and a French Voices award. A longtime documentary filmmaker, Sharon Wood’s writing credits include two Oscar nominees, as well as The Celluloid Closet, Paragraph 175, And the Oscar Goes To and Ai Weiwei: Yours Truly. She co-authored The Art of Nonfiction Movie Making. Sharon and Veronica Selver are making a documentary about literary translation. Ekaterina Petrova is a literary translator and nonfiction writer. She holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa, where she was awarded the Iowa Arts Fellowship. Her translation-in-progress of Iana Boukova’s novel Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow received a 2021 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant. Anna Chiafele is an Associate Professor of Italian Studies at Auburn University, in Alabama. Together with Canadian writer Lisa Pike, Chiafele published a translation of Silvana La Spina’s novel Penelope with Bordighera Press in 2021.