Conversation & Series

Translating the Future: “Activist Translation,” with Anton Hur, Sevinç Türkkan, and Jen Hofer

Tue, Sep 15, 2020

12:00 PM–1:00 PM

Livestream via HowlRound; Register for link below

Watch the video recording of this conversation below:

Join us for Week 19 of Translating the Future as we continue our series of conversations between translators with “Activist Translation,” with Anton Hur, Sevinç Türkkan, andJen Hofer.

Moving between languages is, inevitably, a political process, one that involves many forms of advocacy. Whether that means translating writers whose work is censored in their own languages and countries, promoting language justice locally within multilingual urban communities, or making choices within the text of a translation that challenge preconceived notions and advocate for new perspectives, translators, even those who may not be quite conscious of this fact, are activists.

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, September 15th, at 12:00 PM (EDT).

The conversations will be hosted by Esther Allen & Allison Markin Powell, with guest co-host Lyn Miller-Lachmann. *Viewers can submit questions during the livestreaming at [email protected].

Speaker Bios:

Anton Hur was born in Stockholm and currently divides his time between Seoul and Incheon. A graduate of the Korea University College of Law and a Person of Distinguished Service to the Nation, he has worked as a queer rights activist and currently manages the Korean literary translation collective Smoking Tigers. He has won a PEN Translates award and a PEN/Heim translation grant for his books for Honford Star, and has other translations forthcoming from Tilted Axis Press, Verso Books, Feminist Press, Moonji Books, and Pegasus Books.

Sevinç Türkkan is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Oberlin College where she teaches courses in comparative literature and translation studies. She specializes in cross-cultural studies (contemporary Turkish and German literatures and cultures), translation theory and practice, postcolonial studies, gender and women studies, and psychoanalytic thought. Her publications have appeared in Reading in Translation, Comparative Literature Studies, Public Seminar, Türkisch-deutsche Studien Jahrbuch, Translation and Literature, Teaching Translation, Critical Essays on Orhan Pamuk, Global Perspectives on Orhan Pamuk, Post-1960 Novelists in Turkey, International Journal of the Humanities, and elsewhere. She is the co-editor (with David Damrosch) of Approaches to Teaching the Works of Orhan Pamuk (MLA 2018). Her translation of The Stone Building and Other Places by Aslı Erdoğan was a finalist for the 2019 PEN Translation Prize. Currently, she is at work on a book manuscript titled Translation, Criticism, and the Construction of World Literature. Visit PEN America’s Writers at Risk,an advocacy effort on behalf of individual writers who are being persecuted because of their work. Writers at Risk carries out campaigns to win their release and ensure they are safe and can write and publish freely.

Jen Hofer is a Los Angeles-based poet, translator, interpreter, teacher, knitter, book-maker, public letter-writer, urban cyclist, and co-founder of the language justice and language experimentation collaborative Antena Aire and the local language justice advocacy collective Antena Los Ángeles. Jen has received fellowships and awards from CantoMundo, the Academy of American Poets, the City of Los Angeles, the NEA, and PEN American Center, and is the 2021 visiting Holloway Professor in Poetry & Poetics at UC Berkeley. Jen publishes poems, translations, and visual-textual works with numerous small presses, including Action Books, Counterpath Press, Kenning Editions, Ugly Duckling Presse, and in various DIY/DIT incarnations. Jen’s most recent books are translations by Mexican writers Dolores Dorantes, Myriam Moscona, and Rodrigo Flores Sánchez; translations of Uruguayan poet Virginia Lucas will be published in 2020 by Litmus Press. en el entre / in the between: Selected Writings from Antena Aire will be published in 2020 by The Operating System.

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.