Conversation & Series

Translating the Future: “Motherless Tongues, Multiple Belongings II” with Boris Dralyuk, Eric Tsimi, and Rajiv Mohabir

Tue, Jul 21, 2020

1:30 PM–2:30 PM

Livestream via HowlRound; Register for link below

Click below to watch the video recording of this event:

Join us for Week 11 of Translating the Future as we continue our series of conversations between translators with “Motherless Tongues, Multiple Belongings II” with Boris Dralyuk, Eric Tsimi, and Rajiv Mohabir.

Translating the Future continues its dismantling of the monolingual paradigm, inspired by Yasemin Yildiz’s landmark 2012 Beyond the Mother Tongue and the work of Bruna Dantas Lobato, this time with Cameroonian novelist Eric Tsimi, who writes in French and English and speaks a host of other languages, Boris Dralyuk, translator from the Russian and executive editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books, and poet, translator and memoirist Rajiv Mohabir.

Click here to register for this event and for the link to the livestream. Free and open to the public, the livestream will start at Tue, July 21st, at 1:30 PM (EDT).

The conversations will be hosted by Esther Allen & Allison Markin Powell. *Viewers can submit questions during the livestreaming at [email protected].

Speaker Bios:

Boris Dralyuk is a literary translator and the executive editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is co-editor (with Robert Chandler and Irina Mashinski) of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, editor of 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution and Ten Poems from Russia, and translator of Isaac Babel, Mikhail Zoshchenko, and other authors.

Eric Tsimi is a Cameroonian novelist, playwright, and journalist and an assistant professor at Baruch College, City University of New York. His creative works include Migrant Diaries (2014), A Brief Eruption of Madness (2017) and El Africano (currently on the longlist of finalists for the Prix Hemingway 2020).

Rajiv Mohabir is the author of The Cowherd’s Son (Tupelo Press 2017, winner of the 2015 Kundiman Prize; Eric Hoffer Honorable Mention 2018) and The Taxidermist’s Cut (Four Way Books 2016, winner of the Four Way Books Intro to Poetry Prize, Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry in 2017), and translator of I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara (1916) (Kaya Press 2019) which received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant Award. His memoir won the 2019 Reckless Books’ New Immigrant Writing Prize and is forthcoming 2021. Currently he is an Assistant Professor of poetry in the MFA program at Emerson College, translations editor at Waxwing Journal.

Translating the Future:

Visit Translating the Future page here for the complete conference Program, video recordings of previous events in this series, as well as archival audio recordings, articles, the original program, and more history from PEN’s 1970 World of Translation conference.

This conference and conversation series is co-sponsored by PEN America, the Center for the Humanities at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, with additional support from the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.