On Friday August 24, 2012, Vermont Studio Center and the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers will co-sponsor the third annual Literature in Translation Forum, presenting French poet Emmanuel Moses and his translator, poet Marilyn Hacker. The evening is open to the public and will include a talk, a joint bi-lingual reading, and a question and answer session.
From left: Antonello Borra, Greg Delanty, Geoffrey Brock, Gary Clark, Patrizia Cavalli, Annie Jacobs, 2011 LiT Forum, October 2011
Previous ALSCW/LiT Forums
The inaugural LiT Forum in September 2010, with Polish poet Adam Zagajewski and translator Clare Cavanagh, drew an audience of more than ninety people to the VSC Lowe Lecture Hall (Johnson’s historic opera house). The forum began with Zagajewski reading his poems in both their original Polish and English translations, then moved on to a discussion of their collaborative process, the back story of Adam’s poem “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” (which appeared in the New Yorker immediately following the 9/11 attacks), and a question and answer session. A recording of Zagajewski’s reading was added to VSC’s audio podcast archive, which will be made available for download or streaming.
The 2011 LiT forum featured Italian poet Patrizia Cavalli and poet and translator Geoffrey Brock. The pair presented a talk to an international audience on the challenging role of choice and decision-making within each translation, and they read not only Brock’s translations of Cavalli into English, but Cavalli’s translations of Brock into Italian. Highlights also included Cavalli reading and discussing samples from her translation of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” into Italian.