Litquake – The Art, Craft, and Work of Translation
7:00-9:00 pm PT
The Writer’s Grotto | 1663 Mission St #602 | San Francisco, CA
Event admission is free. A $10–15 donation is suggested.
Translator Sophie Hughes describes translation as “a playful pursuit of equilibrium across an entire work, an exhilarating and, yes, joyful balancing act of loyalties: to sense, to significance, and to style.” Writer and translator May Huang who translates from Chinese; Sabrina Jaszi, a writer and translator working from Russian, Uzbek, and Ukrainian languages; and Japanese translator and professor Andrew Way Leong talk about their own “playful pursuits” and “balancing acts” in their translation practices and offer insight into their methods and projects. Moderated by Giovanna Lomanto.
Part of Litquake’s Words Around the World
Co-presented with Center for the Art of Translation/Two Lines Press
Sabrina Jaszi is a literary translator based in Alameda, CA, working from Uzbek, Ukrainian, and Russian. Her published translations include the works of Salomat Vafo, Suhbat Aflatuni, O‘tkir Hoshimov, Reed Grachev, Nadezhda Teffi, and Alisa Ganieva. Her co-translation with Roman Ivashkiv of Andriy Sodomora’s The Tears and Smiles of Things (Academic Studies Press) received the American Association for Ukrainian Studies’ Best Translation Prize for 2023–24. She is also a writer with stories and essays published in StoryQuarterly, J Journal, The Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere. She is the co-founder of Turkoslavia, a collective and journal devoted to Turkic and Slavic literature in translation. To learn more, visit Turkoslavia.com.
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.
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.