R190. When Your Characters Just Stand There Smoking & Staring: Translation & Invention, Sponsored by ALTA

B117-119, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1
Thursday, March 28, 2019
12:00 pm to 1:15 pm

 

Novelist and translator Maureen Freely once noted that when translating an Orhan Pamuk novel set in Istanbul, the characters in her own Istanbul-set novel just stood there smoking, looking at her, while his had plenty to say. In translating his characters' words, she found her own. This panel explores translation as prompt and liberation for when one’s own words refuse to come. Each panelist provides a reflection and offers examples of how translating has enabled and inspired new work.


Participants

Moderator:

Russell Scott Valentino is an author, editor, and translator based in Bloomington, Indiana. He served as editor in chief at the Iowa Review (2009–2013), ALTA president (2013–2016), and is now professor of Slavic and comparative literature at Indiana University and senior editor at Autumn Hill Books.

Curtis Bauer is a poet, translator, letterpress printer, chapbook publisher and teacher. He lives in Lubbock, TX where he teaches Creative Writing & Comparative Literature at Texas Tech University, runs Q Avenue Press, and is Translations Editor for The Common.

Gregory Pardlo's ​collection​, Digest, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He has received Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, and New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships. Author of the essay collection Air Traffic, he teaches in the Rutgers-Camden MFA program.

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