Future events TBA.

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Translation as Creative Writing 1

Colloquium: Wednesday March 26, 2008
3:00 to 4:15 in Williams 111

This colloquium, which we hope will be only one of many to come, showcases translation as a creative act. Presentations will include short readings and reflections, leaving time for discussion with the audience about the scope of concerns and techniques that go into making translations live in new languages, cultures, imaginaries, and chronotopes.

Shushan Avagyan reads at Cornelia St. Café in NY, Feb. 2007

About the Presenters

Shushan Avagyan is the author of Girk-anvernagir (A Book, Untitled), a novel in Armenian, and co-author of trilingual book of prose (An)taratsutian mej (In the [Un]Space). She is the translator of I Want to Live: Poems of Shushanik Kurghinian (Watertown , Mass.: AIWA Press, 2005) and Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot by Viktor Shklovsky (Dalkey Archive, 2007).

Nicolás Mansito III works across multiple genres - essay, poetry, short fiction, interview, and translation - and between two languages, English and Spanish. His work has appeared in Jacket, Nebula, Rio Grande Review, 21 Stars Review, Words Without Borders, Rhino, Sojourn, Babel Fruit, and The Arabesques Review. Publications are forthcoming in The Human Tentacle, Center, an anthology of poetry entitled The Poetry of Relationships, and a collection of scholarly essays, Proceedings of the International Conference on Caribbean Studies.

Andrea Riley is currently completing a collection of poems and essays discussing identification and female characters in zombie films.  She is also translating a book of poems by Tristan Tzara (French to English) and writing on Gender and Decolonization within literature by Native Women. Riley was assistant dramaturge and language specialist (English to Ojibwe) for Illinois State University 's 2007 rendition of Marie Clement's "The Unnatural and Accidental Women," based on true accounts of Gilbert Paul Jordan, a serial killer who murdered and raped First Nations women. Her poems and nonfiction can be read in elimae and Temenos. 

Kristin Dykstra's The Winter Garden Photograph , an edition of Reina Maria Rodríguez' 1998 La foto del invernadero, is forthcoming from Green Integer.  A dossier of translations and essays is forthcoming in Jacket ; others will appear in The Oxford Anthology of Latin American Poetry and The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry. Something of the Sacred, her translation of Omar Pérez' 1995 Algo de lo sagrado, was published by Factory School in 2007; earlier book projects dealing with Rodríguez' poetry were published by FS and Green Integer. Other recent work appears in Island of My Hunger: Cuban Poetry Today, Fascicle, Origin ~Longhouse, Words without Borders, Connecting Lines: New Poetry from Mexico, Sibila & Circumference. 

Gabriel Gudding is the author of two books, A Defense of Poetry (Pitt Poetry Series, 2002) and rhode island notebook (Dalkey Archive Press, 2008), the latter being a book he wrote entirely in his car during 25 roundtrips on the highways between Providence , RI and Normal, IL . A winner of the Starrett Prize, the Nation Discovery Award, his work appears in such venues as New American Writing, LIT, Fence, American Poetry Review, Sentence, Jacket, and in such anthologies as Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (Scribner, 2003). Gudding's translations are forthcoming in The Oxford Anthology of Latin American Poetry, The Book of Romantic and Post­ Romantic Poetry Poems for the Millennium, and The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry.