EVENTS Oct. 25: John Freeman • Oct. 26: NER Out Loud • Nov. 5: Cree LeFavour

New England Review

Mid-Week Break

Kazim Ali Gives Lecture on “Intentional Mistranslation” at Bread Loaf

Kazim Ali gives a lecture on “Intentional Mistranslation: Locating the Transnational and Polylingual in Anglophone Postcolonial Writing,” in which he discusses language, borders, identity, and the ways in which translation complicates or is complicated by these concepts.

Ali’s books include several volumes of poetry, including Sky Ward, winner of the Ohioana Book Award in Poetry; The Far Mosque, winner of Alice James Books’ New England/New York Award; The Fortieth Day; All One’s Blue; and the cross-genre text Bright Felon. His novels include the recently published The Secret Room: A String Quartet and among his books of essays is Fasting for Ramadan: Notes from a Spiritual Practice.

Ali is associate professor of Creative Writing and Comparative Literature at Oberlin College. His new book of poems, Inquisition, and a new hybrid memoir, Silver Road: Essays, Maps & Calligraphies, will be released in 2018. He is the translator of books by Marguerite Duras, Sohrab Sepehri, Mahmoud Chokrollahi, and Ananda Devi, as well as poems by Cristina Peri Rossi, Henri N’Kuomo, Ahmed Faraz, and Faiz Ahmed Faiz. His work also appears in NER 38.1.

 

 

Mid-Week Break

Emily Wilson and “The Odyssey” at the 2018 Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference

Emily Wilson discusses and reads from her translation of Homer’s The Odyssey at the 2018 Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference. During her lecture, she details her process of translating the work in a way that incorporates it “vividness” as well as its complexity and ambivalence towards its main character.

Wilson is a Professor in the Department of Classical Studies and Chair of the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. Her books include The Death of Socrates, 2007, and a translation of selected tragedies by Seneca, 2010. She has served as the Classics editor of the Norton Anthology of World Literature for many years; the latest revised edition of the anthology appeared in January 2018. She published The Greatest Empire: A life of Seneca, in 2014, and four translations of plays by Euripides in the Modern Library The Greek Plays, 2016. Her new verse translation of the Odyssey was published in November 2017.  She is currently working on a book about translation, gender and the Graeco-Roman classics.

All Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference readings are available in their entirety online. To hear more, please visit the Bread Loaf website.

Mid-Week Break

Jennifer Grotz Reads at the 2018 Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference

Jennifer Grotz reads poems “Incantation” and “The Crows” at the 2018 Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference.

Grotz, Director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences, is the author of three books of poetry, Cusp, The Needle, and most recently, Window Left Open. Also a translator, her Psalms of All My Days, translations from the French poet Patrice de La Tour du Pin, appeared in 2014. Rochester Knockings, by the Tunisian novelist Hubert Haddad, appeared in 2015. With the poet and translator Piotr Sommer, she has recently co-translated from the Polish Everything I Don’t Know, the selected poems of Jerzy Ficowski. Some of the poems from that collection have recently appeared in New England Review, New York Review of Books, Poetry, Parnassus, and the Nation. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, she teaches poetry and translation at the University of Rochester. Her poems and translations have appeared frequently in NER, including her most recent translations of Ficowski  in NER 38.2.

 

Mid-Week Break

Bill Johnston on “Epic Foolishness” at the 2018 Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference


Bill Johnston gives a lecture entitled “Epic Foolishness: Translating Epic Narrative for the 21st Century” at the 2018 Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference. He discusses the challenges of translating not only the story of the Polish poem, Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz, but its tones of voices, diction, and language in order to convey the feeling the author intended.

Johnston has published over thirty book-length translations from the Polish, including poetry, prose, and drama. He has won numerous awards, including the Best Translated Book Award, the PEN Translation Prize, the AATSEEL Translation Prize (twice), and the Found in Translation Award (twice). He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation. His most recent translations include Julia Fiedorczuk’s book of poetry Oxygen (2017) and Adam Mickiewicz’s epic poem Pan Tadeusz (forthcoming from Archipelago this fall). He teaches literary translation at Indiana University. Johnston’s work has also been published in NER 35.4.

All Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference readings are available online. To hear more, please visit the Bread Loaf website.

 

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Categories