Translator
Kareem James Abu-Zeid, PhD, is a translator of poets and novelists from across the Arab world. His work has earned him an NEA translation grant (2018), PEN Center USA’s Translation Award (2017), and Poetry magazine’s translation prize (2014), among other honors. His most recent translation is Najwan Darwish’s Exhausted on the Cross (NYRB Poets, 2021). The online hub for his work is www.kareemjamesabuzeid.com.
Translator
Chris Clarke was raised in Western Canada, and currently lives in Paris, France. His translations include work by Raymond Queneau (New Directions) and Pierre Mac Orlan (Wakefield Press), among others. He was awarded a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant in 2016 for his translation of Marcel Schwob’s Imaginary Lives (Wakefield Press, March 2018). His translation of Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano’s In the Café of Lost Youth (NYRB Classics) was shortlisted for the 2016 French-American Foundation Translation Prize. Chris is a PhD candidate in French at the Graduate Center (CUNY) in New York.
Translator
Heather Green's translation of Tristan Tzara's Noontimes Won was published in 2018 by Octopus Books, and her translation of Tzara's Guide to the Heart Rail was released in 2017 in a limited-run art edition by Goodmorning Menagerie. She is the author of two chapbooks, No Omen and The Match Array, on LATR Press and Dancing Girl Press, respectively. Her poems have appeared in AGNI online, Barrow Street, Denver Quarterly, Phoebe, the New Yorker, the Bennington Review, and many other journals. Her translations of Tzara's work have appeared in Asymptote, Open Letters Monthly, Poetry International, and several anthologies. She holds an MA in literature from University of Nebraska and an MFA in creative writing from Boston University and currently teaches at George Mason University.
Translator
Author of two full-length poetry collections: The Book of Funnels (Wave Books, 2005) and Citizen Of (Wave, 2007); four chapbooks: Hour Hour (Delirium Press, 2005), Petitions for an Alien Relative (Hand Held Editions, 2009), Ulf (Factory Hollow Press, 2010), and Sonette mit Elizabethanischem Maulwurf (hochroth verlag, 2010); the cross-genre book Ventrakl (2010, Ugly Duckling Presse); and (with Uljana Wolf) Sonne from Ort, a collaborative bilingual erasure (kookbooks verlag, Berlin, 2013); he has received a Creative Capital Innovative Literature Award (2006) and a DAAD Artist-in-Berlin Fellowship (2008); translates contemporary German-language poetry and prose.
Translator
Elisabeth Jaquette is a translator from Arabic, instructor at Hunter College, and executive director of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA). Among her book-length translations are The Apartment in Bab el-Louk by Donia Maher, illustrated by Ganzeer and Ahmed Nady, and The Queue by Basma Abdel Aziz. Elisabeth is the recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Grant and an English PEN Translates Award. Her work has been shortlisted for the TA First Translation Prize, and longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award.
Translator
Megan McDowell is a Spanish language literary translator. She focuses on contemporary Latin American authors, and her translations include books by Alejandro Zambra, Samanta Schweblin, Mariana Enriquez, Lina Meruane, Diego Zuñiga, and Carlos Fonseca. Her short story translations have been featured in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Tin House, McSweeney’s, Granta, and the Virginia Quarterly Review, among others. Her translation of Alejandro Zambra’s novel Ways of Going Home won the 2013 English PEN award for writing in translation, and her English version of Fever Dream, by Samanta Schweblin, was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize. She has lived in Portugal and Switzerland, and currently resides in Santiago, Chile.
Translator
Anna Deeny Morales is a translator and literary critic. Recent translations include Floating Lanterns (Shearsman Books, 2015) by Mercedes Roffé and Sky Below: Selected Works by Raúl Zurita. Other translations of Zurita’s works include Purgatory (University of California Press, 2009) and Dreams for Kurosawa (arrow as aarow, 2012). She is an adjunct professor in the Center for Latin American Studies at Georgetown University.
Translator
Sawako Nakayasu is an artist working with language, performance, and translation—separately and in various combinations. She has lived mostly in the US and Japan, briefly in France and China, and translates from Japanese. Her books include The Ants (Les Figues Press), Texture Notes (Letter Machine Editions), the translation of Tatsumi Hijikata’s Costume en Face: A Primer of Darkness for Young Boys and Girls (UDP), The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa (Canarium Books), and Mouth: Eats Color – Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-translations, & Originals (Rogue Factorial), a multilingual work of both original and translated poetry. She is co-editor of A Transpacific Poetics (Litmus Press), a gathering of poetry and poetics engaging transpacific imaginaries, as well as of a forthcoming anthology of 20th Century Japanese Poetry, co-edited with Eric Selland (New Directions). She teaches at Brown University.
Translator
Vivek Narayanan holds an M.A. in Cultural Anthropology from Stanford University, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University. He was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University and a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library. Narayanan has taught history, anthropology, and creative writing in many places, including the University of Kwazulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa, and the Center for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi. His books include Universal Beach (Harbour Line Press, 2006; In Girum Books, 2011) and Life and Times of Mr S (Harper Collins India, 2012). His essays, criticism, and poetry have appeared widely in Agni, Granta, The Village Voice, Harvard Review, Caravan, and elsewhere.
Translator
Marcia Lynx Qualey is the founding editor of ArabLit, an online magazine and resource that won the 2017 “Literary Translation Initiative” award at the London Book Fair. She writes, edits, and translates for a variety of newspapers and magazines, teaches writing in Morocco, and also works with a number of Arabic literature projects, including Kitab Sawti and the Library of Arabic Literature.
Translator
Lara Vergnaud is a translator of literary and scholarly works from the French. She currently lives in Washington, D.C.
Translator
Alex Zucker’s translations include novels by J. R. Pick, Petra Hůlová, Jáchym Topol, Magdaléna Platzová, Tomáš Zmeškal, Josef Jedlička, Heda Margolius Kovály, Patrik Ouředník, and Miloslava Holubová. He has also translated stories, plays, young adult and children’s books, essays, subtitles, song lyrics, reportage, and poems. His translations of Petra Hůlová’s Three Plastic Rooms and Jáchym Topol’s The Devil’s Workshop received Writing in Translation awards from English PEN, and he won the ALTA National Translation Award in 2010 for Petra Hůlová’s All This Belongs to Me. In addition to translating, Alex works in editing and communications. He lives in Brooklyn.
September 27, 2018
2nd Annual Day of Translation with the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center
The Bistro (G38) | Johnson Student Center | George Mason University | 4400 University Drive | Fairfax, Virginia
This event has already taken place.
Join us for our second annual Day of Translation co-presented with the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center. All panels and events will take place at the Bistro (G38) in the Johnson Student Center on the George Mason University campus in Fairfax, VA.
All events are free and open to the public.
Writers and translators appearing include: Kareem James Abu-Zeid, Chris Clarke, Heather Green, Christian Hawkey, Elisabeth Jaquette, Megan McDowell, Anna Morales, Sawako Nakayasu, Vivek Narayanan, Marcia Lynx Qualey, Lara Vergnaud, and Alex Zucker.
SCHEDULE OF EVENTS
9:00-9:15 WELCOME
9:15-10:15 EXPERIMENTAL TRANSLATION
Chris Clarke, Christian Hawkey, Sawako Nakayasu, Vivek Narayanan
10:30-11:45 THE POLITICS & ADVOCACY OF TRANSLATION
Michael Holtmann, Anna Morales, Marcia Lynx Qualey, Alex Zucker
12:00-1:30 BREAK
1:30-2:45 ARABIC LITERATURE IN TRANSLATION
Kareem James Abu-Zeid, Matt Davis, Elisabeth Jaquette, Marcia Lynx Qualey
3:00-4:15 PATHS TOWARD TRANSLATION
Heather Green, Elisabeth Jaquette, Lara Vergnaud, Alex Zucker
4:30 KEYNOTE: Megan McDowell
Contact:
Translator
Kareem James Abu-Zeid, PhD, is a translator of poets and novelists from across the Arab world. His work has earned him an NEA translation grant (2018), PEN Center USA’s Translation Award (2017), and Poetry magazine’s translation prize (2014), among other honors. His most recent translation is Najwan Darwish’s Exhausted on the Cross (NYRB Poets, 2021). The online hub for his work is www.kareemjamesabuzeid.com.
Translator
Chris Clarke was raised in Western Canada, and currently lives in Paris, France. His translations include work by Raymond Queneau (New Directions) and Pierre Mac Orlan (Wakefield Press), among others. He was awarded a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant in 2016 for his translation of Marcel Schwob’s Imaginary Lives (Wakefield Press, March 2018). His translation of Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano’s In the Café of Lost Youth (NYRB Classics) was shortlisted for the 2016 French-American Foundation Translation Prize. Chris is a PhD candidate in French at the Graduate Center (CUNY) in New York.
Translator
Heather Green's translation of Tristan Tzara's Noontimes Won was published in 2018 by Octopus Books, and her translation of Tzara's Guide to the Heart Rail was released in 2017 in a limited-run art edition by Goodmorning Menagerie. She is the author of two chapbooks, No Omen and The Match Array, on LATR Press and Dancing Girl Press, respectively. Her poems have appeared in AGNI online, Barrow Street, Denver Quarterly, Phoebe, the New Yorker, the Bennington Review, and many other journals. Her translations of Tzara's work have appeared in Asymptote, Open Letters Monthly, Poetry International, and several anthologies. She holds an MA in literature from University of Nebraska and an MFA in creative writing from Boston University and currently teaches at George Mason University.
Translator
Author of two full-length poetry collections: The Book of Funnels (Wave Books, 2005) and Citizen Of (Wave, 2007); four chapbooks: Hour Hour (Delirium Press, 2005), Petitions for an Alien Relative (Hand Held Editions, 2009), Ulf (Factory Hollow Press, 2010), and Sonette mit Elizabethanischem Maulwurf (hochroth verlag, 2010); the cross-genre book Ventrakl (2010, Ugly Duckling Presse); and (with Uljana Wolf) Sonne from Ort, a collaborative bilingual erasure (kookbooks verlag, Berlin, 2013); he has received a Creative Capital Innovative Literature Award (2006) and a DAAD Artist-in-Berlin Fellowship (2008); translates contemporary German-language poetry and prose.
Translator
Elisabeth Jaquette is a translator from Arabic, instructor at Hunter College, and executive director of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA). Among her book-length translations are The Apartment in Bab el-Louk by Donia Maher, illustrated by Ganzeer and Ahmed Nady, and The Queue by Basma Abdel Aziz. Elisabeth is the recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Grant and an English PEN Translates Award. Her work has been shortlisted for the TA First Translation Prize, and longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award.
Translator
Megan McDowell is a Spanish language literary translator. She focuses on contemporary Latin American authors, and her translations include books by Alejandro Zambra, Samanta Schweblin, Mariana Enriquez, Lina Meruane, Diego Zuñiga, and Carlos Fonseca. Her short story translations have been featured in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Tin House, McSweeney’s, Granta, and the Virginia Quarterly Review, among others. Her translation of Alejandro Zambra’s novel Ways of Going Home won the 2013 English PEN award for writing in translation, and her English version of Fever Dream, by Samanta Schweblin, was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize. She has lived in Portugal and Switzerland, and currently resides in Santiago, Chile.
Translator
Anna Deeny Morales is a translator and literary critic. Recent translations include Floating Lanterns (Shearsman Books, 2015) by Mercedes Roffé and Sky Below: Selected Works by Raúl Zurita. Other translations of Zurita’s works include Purgatory (University of California Press, 2009) and Dreams for Kurosawa (arrow as aarow, 2012). She is an adjunct professor in the Center for Latin American Studies at Georgetown University.
Translator
Sawako Nakayasu is an artist working with language, performance, and translation—separately and in various combinations. She has lived mostly in the US and Japan, briefly in France and China, and translates from Japanese. Her books include The Ants (Les Figues Press), Texture Notes (Letter Machine Editions), the translation of Tatsumi Hijikata’s Costume en Face: A Primer of Darkness for Young Boys and Girls (UDP), The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa (Canarium Books), and Mouth: Eats Color – Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-translations, & Originals (Rogue Factorial), a multilingual work of both original and translated poetry. She is co-editor of A Transpacific Poetics (Litmus Press), a gathering of poetry and poetics engaging transpacific imaginaries, as well as of a forthcoming anthology of 20th Century Japanese Poetry, co-edited with Eric Selland (New Directions). She teaches at Brown University.
Translator
Vivek Narayanan holds an M.A. in Cultural Anthropology from Stanford University, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University. He was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University and a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library. Narayanan has taught history, anthropology, and creative writing in many places, including the University of Kwazulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa, and the Center for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi. His books include Universal Beach (Harbour Line Press, 2006; In Girum Books, 2011) and Life and Times of Mr S (Harper Collins India, 2012). His essays, criticism, and poetry have appeared widely in Agni, Granta, The Village Voice, Harvard Review, Caravan, and elsewhere.
Translator
Marcia Lynx Qualey is the founding editor of ArabLit, an online magazine and resource that won the 2017 “Literary Translation Initiative” award at the London Book Fair. She writes, edits, and translates for a variety of newspapers and magazines, teaches writing in Morocco, and also works with a number of Arabic literature projects, including Kitab Sawti and the Library of Arabic Literature.
Translator
Lara Vergnaud is a translator of literary and scholarly works from the French. She currently lives in Washington, D.C.
Translator
Alex Zucker’s translations include novels by J. R. Pick, Petra Hůlová, Jáchym Topol, Magdaléna Platzová, Tomáš Zmeškal, Josef Jedlička, Heda Margolius Kovály, Patrik Ouředník, and Miloslava Holubová. He has also translated stories, plays, young adult and children’s books, essays, subtitles, song lyrics, reportage, and poems. His translations of Petra Hůlová’s Three Plastic Rooms and Jáchym Topol’s The Devil’s Workshop received Writing in Translation awards from English PEN, and he won the ALTA National Translation Award in 2010 for Petra Hůlová’s All This Belongs to Me. In addition to translating, Alex works in editing and communications. He lives in Brooklyn.