Pursuing the Impossible: Poetry and the Art of Translation
2:30 pm Pacific
Bay Area Book Festival | The Marsh Berkeley – Cabaret | Berkeley, California
Voltaire once claimed, “It is impossible to translate poetry. Can you translate music?” If that’s true, these talented translators have certainly achieved the impossible—in this session, they’ll share insights into how they did so. Olivia Sears, founder of the Center for the Art of Translation, took on a challenge not only of language but also of design with her translation of Italian Futurist poet Ardengo Soffici’s Simultaneities and Lyric Chemisms. Presented like a facsimile edition, complete with the original fonts, Soffici’s work in Sears’s translation brims with the promise of modernity and the metropolis. In Names and Rivers, co-translators Tomoyuki and Forrest Gander bring the work of influential contemporary Japanese poet Shuri Kido to English for the first time, in a bilingual edition that introduces readers to poems deeply engaged with nature and time. Sears and Gander will read from their translations and also engage in conversation—moderated by CJ Evans, poet and editorial director of Two Lines Press—about the unique (if not impossible) challenges and rewards that poetry grants the translator.
Book signing information: Marcus Books, at the venue
Sponsored by Reed Schmidt, with the support of Center for the Art of Translation
Forrest Gander, born in the Mojave Desert, lives in California. A translator and multi-genre writer with degrees in geology and literature, he’s the recipient of numerous awards, among them the Pulitzer Prize, the Best Translated Book Award, and fellowships from the Library of Congress, the Guggenheim, and United States Artists Foundations. His recent book, Twice Alive, focuses on human and ecological intimacies.
Olivia E. Sears is a translator of Italian poetry and founder of the Center for the Art of Translation, where she edited the journal Two Lines for over a decade. Her translations of contemporary poet Mariangela Gualtieri have recently appeared in Arkansas International, Circumference, The Common, and Copper Nickel, among others. She is currently completing a manuscript of Gualtieri’s poetry in English, When I Wasn’t Dying.
CJ Evans is the author of A Penance (New Issues Press) and The Category of Outcast and received the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship and a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship.