Day of Translation 2024
Celebrating CAT’s annual Day of Translation co-hosted by The Center for Fiction, a symposium of provocative panels & a keynote by Don Mee Choi.
Panel 1: Fiction & Translation
What is the relationship between translation and creative writing? Is all writing, in fact, a translation of sorts? This panel investigates the connections and boundaries between writing and translating, how one informs the other, and what happens when you do both. Outside of the US, it’s not unlikely for fiction writers to also translate, but until recently this was a rare phenomenon here in the states. This panel brings together acclaimed literary translators who have recently published their own works of fiction to investigate how their backgrounds as translators impact their work as fiction writers.
PANELISTS: Jennifer Croft, Bruna Dantas Lobato, Lily Meyer, and Idra Novey
Panel 2: Desert Poetics & Translation
What’s illuminated when translated literature is approached from the common ground of environment, rather than language or nation? In this panel, we focus on one particular environment, the desert, and how it connects translated literary works across borders. Together we challenge literary tropes about the desert as an empty or barren space, or the site of Orientalist fantasies, exile for societal outcasts, road trips, and climate change allegories. Excavating desert histories of colonialism, war, environmental destruction, and language loss, we find beauty in the aesthetics of the desert and come to understand why many writers see it as a rich and fertile space for transformation.
PANELISTS: Fernando A. Flores, Samia Henni (joining remotely), Mayada Ibrahim, Elisabeth Jaquette, and Heather Nagami
Panel 3: Typography & Translation
Graphic designer and curator Ellen Lupton once said, “Typography is what language looks like.” This panel explores intersections between the arts of typography and translation. Typography combines form and function, semantic and visual. Thus, it is important for translators to consider the political implications of their chosen aesthetics. Bringing together typographers, educators, artists, and translators working with different scripts, we will discuss how interventions in typography can be used to address issues in translation such as accessibility, gendered binaries, language preservation and revival, and colonial histories. We look at examples of typographers who are expanding the definition of typography outside of traditional forms and examine how design can help literary translators in their craft.
PANELISTS: Axxenne, Arielle Burgdorf, Bo-Won Keum, Omar Mohammad, Marouchka Payen, and Léna Salabert-Triby
Keynote: Don Mee Choi
Born in Seoul, South Korea, Don Mee Choi is the author of the KOR-US trilogy: Mirror Nation (Wave Books, 2024), the National Book Award-winning collection DMZ Colony (Wave Books, 2020), and Hardly War (Wave Books, 2016). She is a recipient of fellowships from the MacArthur, Guggenheim, Lannan, and Whiting Foundations, as well as the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program. Her translation of Kim Hyesoon’s poetry won the 2019 International Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry.
Giovanna Lomanto is a poet and essayist with a tendency to play the same song on repeat until she has memorized every last note. She received her BA in English at U.C. Berkeley and finished her MFA at NYU, during which time she published two poetry collections and two mixed media chapbooks.
