Alan Cheuse International Writers Center hosts Day of Translation on April 5

The Cheuse Center, in partnership with the Center for the Art of Translation in San Francisco, will be holding a Day of Translation to discuss the art and issues of literary translation. With panelists such as Karen Emmerich of Princeton, Bruce Fulton of the University of British Columbia, and Howard Norman of the University of Maryland, the event will host panel topics such as "Spanish-Language Literature in Translation," "The Politics of Translation," and "The Art of Translation."

Schedule details

Wednesday, April 5, 2017 10:00 AM to 5:30 PM
Merten Hall, room 1203

10:00: Welcome and Thanks—Matthew Davis and Leslie-Ann Woofter

10:30-11:20: Contemporary Spanish-Language Literature in Translation

  • Roy Kesey (moderator)
  • Sergio Waisman
  • Maria Jose Gimenez

11:30-12:20: The Politics of Translation

  • Matthew Davis (moderator)
  • Soledad Marambio
  • Howard Norman
  • Kareem Abdulrahman

12:30-2:00: LUNCH

2:00-3:00: The Art of Translation

  • Karen Emmerich (moderator)
  • Katrine Jensen
  • Bruce Fulton
  • Vivek Narayanan

3:15-4:15: The Literature of Exile and Asylum

  • Matthew Davis (moderator)
  • Khet Mar
  • Bruce Fulton
  • Osama Alomar 

4:30: Keynote Address—Karen Emmerich

Panelist bios:

Kareem Abdulrahman

Kareem Abdulrahman is a Kurdish translator and journalist. He obtained his MA in Journalism from the University of Westminster. He worked for over eight years with the BBC, where translation from Kurdish was part of his remit. He is currently Head of Editorial at Insight, a monitoring and analysis service focusing on Kurdish and Iraqi affairs. In 2013, he was awarded a place on the British Centre for Literary Translation’s prestigious mentorship programme. His translation of prominent Iraqi Kurdish novelist Bakhtiyar Ali's I Stared at the Night of the City – the first Kurdish novel to be translated into English - was published in 2016 in the UK by Periscope. He lives in London.

Osama Alomar 

Osama Alomar was born in Damascus, Syria, in 1968. A well known writer of short stories, poetry, and essays, Alomar published FULLBLOOD ARABIAN, by new Directions in 2014, his first volume in English translation. A Norwegian edition of FULLBLOOD ARABIAN was published last year in 2016. His new collection of short stories THE TEETH OF THE COMB will be released on April 25th of this year by New Directions. His writing has been published in Coffin Factory, The Literary Review, Ploughshares, Gigantic, Dissent, Triquarterly, and The New Yorker website.

Karen Emmerich

Karen Emmerich is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University and a translator of (modern) Greek poetry and prose. Her monograph _Literary Translation and the Making of Originals_ is due out next fall from Bloomsbury Academic. She has translated 11 books of Greek literature, and is the recipient of the PEN Poetry in Translation Award, as well as grants and awards from PEN, the NEA, and the Modern Greek Studies Association. 

Bruce Fulton

Bruce Fulton is the inaugural holder of the Young-Bin Min Chair in Korean Literature and Literary Translation, Department of Asian Studies, University of British Columbia. He is the co-translator, with Ju-Chan Fulton, of numerous works of modern Korean fiction; co-editor, with Kwon Youngmin, of Modern Korean Fiction (Columbia University Press, 2005), editor of the Korea section of the Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature (2003); and general editor of the Modern Korean Fiction series published by the University of Hawai’i Press.

He is the co-recipient of several translation awards and grants, including the first National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship for a Korean literary work, the Fourth Annual Chametzky Prize for Translation, and the first residency awarded by the Banff International Literary Translation Centre for the translation of a work from any Asian Language. His most recent translations, with Ju-Chan Fulton, are the graphic novel Moss by Yoon Taeho (serialized at the Huffington Post), The Human Jungle by Cho Chŏngnae (Chin Music Press), and Sunset: A Ch’ae Manshik Reader (forthcoming from Columbia University Press).

Maria Jose Gimenez

Maria Jose Gimenez is a Venezuelan-Canadian poet and translator. Recipient of a 2016 Gabo Prize for Translation and fellowships from the NEA, The Banff International Literary Translation Centre, and the Katharine Bakeless Nason Endowment, María José is co-director of Montreal’s collective The Apostles Review and Assistant Translation Editor for Drunken Boat.

Katrine Øgaard Jensen

Katrine Øgaard Jensen is a translator and writer. She is one of the founding editors of EuropeNow, a journal of research and art at Columbia University, and a returning judge for the Best Translated Book Award. She previously served as editor in chief of the Columbia Journal and blog editor of the international literary journals Asymptote and Words Without Borders. Her work has appeared in the Washington Square Review, the Denver QuarterlyArc Poetry MagazineOhio Edit, theColumbia Journal, and elsewhere.

Roy Kesey

Roy Kesey is the translator of Pola Oloixarac's debut novel, Savage Theories (Soho Press 2017.) He is the author of two short story collections and two novels. He has won an NEA grant for fiction and a PEN/Heim grant for translation. His short stories, essays, translations and poems have appeared in over a hundred magazines and anthologies, including Best American Short Stories and New Sudden Fiction.

Khet Mar

Khet Mar is a Burmese journalist, novelist, short story writer, poet and essayist who has actively written about the true lives of ordinary people and the current situation in Burma. Trained as a chemist, Khet Mar embarked on a writing career and published the novel “Wild Snowy Night” and "Night Birds" four collections of short stories, three volume of essays and a translation of “I am Malala”. Her works have translated into Japanese, Spanish, English and broadcast.

In 2007 she participated in the prestigious International Writing Program at University of Iowa and in 2014, International Writers’ Workshop at Hong Kong Baptist University in Hong Kong. In addition to her writing, Khet Mar is a community developer and environmental activist. She was also a volunteer teacher for a school aimed to help young children living with HIV/AIDS and worked as an organizer for other Monastic Orphanage Education Schools in Rangoon, Burma.  In 2009 she was a featured writer at the PEN Word Voices Festival, and was a writer-in-residence at City of Asylum/Pittsburgh, which provides sanctuary to writers exiled under threat of severe persecution in their native countries. In April 2011, Khet Mar participated in Writers in Motion, which is sponsored through grant funds provided by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the US Department of State.

 Soledad Marambio

Soledad Marambio was born in Santiago, Chile. She is a poet, translator and an editor at Brutas Editoras and is currently a PhD. Candidate at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her poetry and prose has appeared in publications such as Granta and Palabras Errantes. She has published En la Noche los Pájaros (La Calabaza del Diablo, 2013) and her second poetry collection, Chintungo, is forthcoming in Spanish from Edicola ediciones and in English from Ugly Duklin Presse. She has translated Anne Carson’s The Glassy Essay and Variations on the Right to Remain Silent. Her translation of Anne Carson’s The Fall of Rome is forthcoming from Alquimia Ediciones (Chile)

Vivek Narayanan

Vivek Narayanan holds an MA 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 in 2013-14 and a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library in 2015-16--working on a book of poems about Valmiki’s Ramayana.

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 of poems include Universal Beach (Harbour Line Press, 2006/In Girum Books, 2011) and Life and Times of Mr S (HarperCollins India, 2012). A full-length collection of his poems in Swedish translation was published in 2015 by the Stockholm-based Wahlström & Widstrand. He is co-editor of Almost Island, a nine-year old India-based journal, literary organization and publisher. His essays, criticism, and poetry have appeared in Agni, Granta,The Village Voice, Harvard Review, Caravan and elsewhere, and his poems have been included in anthologies such as The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets(Bloodaxe), The Oxford Poets Anthology 2013 (Carcanet), 60 Indian Poets (Penguin) and Language for a New Century (W.W. Norton).

Howard Norman

For his work in translation, Howard Norman received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, a Wenner-Grenn Fellowship, and the Harold Morton Landon Prize in Translation from the Academy of American Poets. His works of translation include Northern Tales (Patheon Folklore and Fairy Tale Library) and in an arctic memoir, IN FOND REMEMBRANCE OF ME.

He has served on over thirty panels on translation, including in Amsterdam, London, Toronto and New York.  He is the author of novels, memoirs and books for children, and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Maryland, and is on the faculty of the New York Summer Writers Institute. He received the Lannan Award in literature.

Sergio Waisman

Sergio Waisman is Professor of Spanish and Latin American Literatures, and Affiliated Faculty of Judaic Studies at The George Washington University. He has translated, among others, The Underdogs: A Novel of the Mexican Revolution by Mariano Azuela (Penguin Classics), three books by the Argentine Ricardo Piglia, and three titles for Oxford’s Library of Latin America series. His book Borges and Translation: The Irreverence of the Periphery has been published in English, Spanish, and Italian. In 2000 he received an NEA Translation Fellowship Award for his translation of Ricardo Piglia’s The Absent City (Duke Univ. Press).

Sergio Waisman is also the author of the novel Leaving, which he self-translated into Spanish, and published as Irse in Argentina. His latest book is Target in the Night, the translation of Ricardo Piglia’s Blanco Nocturno, published by Deep Vellum in 2015. He is currently translating El limonero real [The Royal Lemon Tree] by Juan José Saer (forthcoming, Open Letter Books) and co-translating, with Denise Kripper, Buenos, Limpios & Lindos [Good, Clean & Fun] by Vera Fogwill.