A Celebration of Burton Pike
Fri, Nov 17, 2023
6:00 PM–7:30 PM
The Skylight Room (9100) at the CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Ave, NYC. Please register below to attend.
Burton Pike (1930-2022) was a translator of German and French, known particularly for his work on Robert Musil, including the translation, with Sophie Wilkins, of The Man Without Qualities (1996). He was, as well, a scholar of literature, culture, and translation, author of Robert Musil: An Introduction to His Work (1961) and The Image of the City in Modern Literature (1981),
which was translated into Japanese. A beloved and influential professor and mentor, who numbered Paul de Man and Tomi Ungerer among his friends, Burton was for many years chair of Comparative Literature and German at the CUNY Graduate Center. A Guggenheim, American Council of Learned Societies, and Fulbright Fellow, he was awarded the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize in 2012 for his translation of Gerhard Meier’s Isle of the Dead, and later received the Friedrich Ulfers Prize for his work championing German literature in the United States. He was also awarded the Medal of Merit by the City of Klagenfurt, Austria, for his work on Musil.
Please join us Fri, Nov 17th at 6:00 pm in the Skylight Room at the CUNY Graduate Center, when friends, colleagues, former students, and admirers of Burton will pay tribute to his memory and celebrate the newly published Underlying Rhythm, an anthology of writing and translation that honors his life, work and friendship.
Participants will include Ammiel Alcalay, Esther Allen, David Auerbach, Evelyn Barish, Susan Bernofsky, Roger Celestin, Peter Constantine, Robert Cowan, Genese Grill, Norma Hurlbut, Mark Mirsky, David Rios, Ekaterina Sukhanova, Peter Wortsman, and others.
This celebration event is co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities, the Ph.D. Program in Comparative
Literature, and the MA in Liberal Studies Literary Translation
Concentration at the CUNY Graduate Center, as well as World Poetry
Books, The Center for Fiction, Fiction Magazine, and the Goethe Institute.
Related Events
Celebration
PEN International: 100 Years Celebrating Literature and Promoting Freedom of Expression
Conversation
Playing By Ear: Translating Literary Non-Fiction with Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
Conversation
Translation Is a Mode = Translation Is an Anti-neocolonial Mode: Readings and Roundtable Discussion
Conversation & Series
Translating the Future Finale: A Flight of Tokarczuk Translators
Conversation & Series
Translating the Future Finale: “Democracy and Translation” with Natalie Diaz, Marilyn Nelson, & Ken Liu
Conversation & Series
Translating the Future Finale at Columbia University: Translating for a World on Fire, with Maria Dahvana Headley and Emily Wilson, moderated by Susan Bernofsky
Conversation & Series
Translating the Future Finale: Postmonolingual New York with Ava Chin, Jasmine Claude-Narcisse, Damion Searls, and Lisandro Pérez
Conversation & Series
Translating the Future Finale: “On the Elusive Art of Translation,” with Kate Briggs and Tracy K. Smith, moderated by Magdalena Edwards
Conversation & Series
Translating the Future: “Activist Translation,” with Anton Hur, Sevinç Türkkan, and Jen Hofer
Conversation & Series
Translating the Future: “Untranslating the Classics,” with Laurie Patton, Gopal Sukhu & Vivek Narayanan
