Two Voices Salon: Donald Nicholson-Smith on Abdellatif Laâbi
Center for the Art of Translation | 582 Market Street, Suite 700 | San Francisco, CA
Two Voices Salon celebrating the release of prize-winning Moroccan poet Abdellatif Laâbi’s latest book, In Praise of Defeat, translated from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
0:00 Donald Nicholson-Smith overviewing Laâbi’s life and career
5:30 Laâbi’s “prison poetry”
8:50 a reading of some of Laâbi’s prison poetry
13:15 The challenges of translating Laâbi’s poetry and Nicholson-Smith’s unique approach
22:50 The reasons for publishing Laâbi’s poerty bilingually in French and English, and the advantages to this presentation
29:00 Why Laâbi to chose to write in French and what this meant for Morocco’s poet tradition
36:05 Audience Q & A
Donald Nicholson-Smith is a translator and editor focused on psychology and social criticism, more recently moving to fiction—especially noir fiction—and poetry. Nicholson-Smith was shortlisted for the French-American Prize for his translation of Apollinaire’s Letters to Madeleine, and he has received numerous awards, including a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres for services to French literature in translation.
Abdellatif Laâbi is a novelist, poet, and playwright. Laâbi is the French translator of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, Moroccan poet Abdallah Zrika, Iraqi poet Abdelawahab Al Bayati, and Syrian novelist Hanna Minna. He has edited numerous anthologies, most notably one of twentieth-century Moroccan poetry. He received the Prix Goncourt de la Poésie in 2009 and the Académie française’s Grand prix de la Francophonie in 2011.