The Art of Translation @ LITLIT
LITLIT, or The Little Literary Fair(opens in a new tab), is a free celebration of independent book publishers, bookmakers, and booksellers on the West Coast. Presented by the Los Angeles Review of Books(opens in a new tab) (LARB) in partnership with Hauser & Wirth Publishers(opens in a new tab), LITLIT will return to LA on July 30 – 31!
As a sponsor of LITLIT, The Center for the Art of Translation is proud to co-present a conversation between four eminent translators as they discuss the hard-fought, increasing visibility of their art and offer insight into their methods and projects. Participants include translators Andrew Way Leong (Lament in the Night, The Ones Who Leave), Bruna Dantas Lobato (Moldy Strawberries, The Words that Remain), and Robin Myers (Copy, The Dream of Every Cell), moderated by Magdalena Edwards.
All are welcome! Registration is encouraged but not required.
Magdalena Edwards is a writer, actor, and translator from Spanish and Portuguese. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at UCLA’s Latin American Institute and an Artist in Residence at Highways Performance Space. Her work has appeared in Boston Review, The Paris Review Daily, Los Angeles Review of Books, Words Without Borders, Full Stop, The Point, London Review of Books, The Millions, Rattle, The Critical Flame, and Chile’s leading newspaper, El Mercurio. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from UCLA and a BA in Social Studies from Harvard.
Bruna Dantas Lobato is a fiction writer and translator. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Guernica, A Public Space, and The Common. She was awarded the 2023 National Book Award in Translated Literature for The Words that Remain by Stênio Gardel. Originally from Natal, Brazil, she lives in Iowa and teaches at Grinnell College. Her debut novel, Blue Light Hours, is forthcoming in October 2024 from Grove Atlantic.
Robin Myers is a poet and Spanish-to-English translator. Her translations include Copy by Dolores Dorantes (Wave Books), The Dream of Every Cell by Maricela Guerrero (Cardboard House Press), The Book of Explanations by Tedi López Mills (Deep Vellum Publishing), Another Life by Daniel Lipara (Eulalia Books), Cars on Fire by Mónica Ramón Ríos (Open Letter Books), and other works of poetry and prose. She lives in Mexico City. (Photo credit: Nuria Lagarde)
Andrew Way Leong is assistant professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on the literature of Japanese diasporas in the Americas as well as queer and critical theoretical approaches to the study of literary genre, gendered embodiment, and generational time. He is the translator of Lament in the Night (Kaya Press 2012), a collection of two novels by Nagahara Shōson, an author who wrote for a Japanese reading public in Los Angeles during the 1920s. This translation received an Association for Asian American Studies Outstanding Book Award in 2014. Leong is also the 2018 recipient of the Association for Asian American Studies’ Early Career Achievement Award.