Conversation & Series

Translating the Future Finale: “On the Elusive Art of Translation,” with Kate Briggs and Tracy K. Smith, moderated by Magdalena Edwards

Tue, Sep 22, 2020

1:30 PM–2:30 PM

Livestream via HowlRound; Register for link below

Watch the video recording of this event here:

Join us for the finale of Translating the Future, a 20-week series of conversations between translators, with “On the Elusive Art of Translation,” featuringKate Briggs and Tracy K. Smith, and moderated by Magdalena Edwards.

For the final event in our Tuesday conversation series, and the first event of Translating the Future’s culminating week, we’ll hear from luminaries Kate Briggs, author of This Little Art, and Tracy K. Smith, former U.S. poet laureate, whose forthcoming book, co-translated with Changtai Bi, is Yi Lei’s My Name Will Grow Wide LIke a Tree. Their conversation will be moderated by Magdalena Edwards, translator of Clarice Lispector. Sponsored by the Princeton University Program in Translation & Intercultural Communication.

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 22nd, 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:

Tracy K. Smith is the author of four collections of poetry, among them Life on Mars, winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize, and Wade in the Water, winner of the 2019 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. Her memoir, Ordinary Light, was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award. While serving as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States, Smith edited the anthology American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time. With her original libretto for the opera “Castor and Patience,” a collaboration with composer Gregory Spears, Smith takes up a portion of what has been described as the unfinished work of Reconstruction. Probing historical and ongoing obstacles to Black land ownership in the United States, “Castor and Patience” will premiere in Cincinnati in 2021. Smith began translating the poems of contemporary Chinese poet Yi Lei (1951-2018) in early 2014, with collaborator Changtai Bi. That work, which transpired in the US and China over the last years of Yi Lei’s life, brought Smith into robust dialogue with one of China’s most original and independent voices. My Name Will Grow Wide like a Tree: Selected Poems of Yi Lei, will be published by Graywolf Press in November 2020.

Magdalena Edwards is a writer, actor, and translator from Spanish & Portuguese based in Los Angeles, California. She has translated Clarice Lispector, Márcia Tiburi, Silviano Santiago, Nicanor Parra, Raúl Zurita, and Oscar Contardo, among others. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review Daily, the Boston Review, the Millions, El Mercurio, Rattle, the Critical Flame, Full Stop, The Point, Words Without Borders, London Review of Books, Los Angeles Review of Books, Jornal Rascunho, Virada and Revista Transas. Currently a Visiting Scholar at UCLA’s Latin American Institute, Magdalena holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from UCLA and a BA in Social Studies from Harvard. Twitter: @magda8lena – Instagram: @msmagda8lena – More: www.magdalenaedwards.com

Kate Briggs is a writer and translator based in Rotterdam, NL, where she teaches on the Masters in Fine Art at the Piet Zwart Institute. She is the author, most recently, of This Little Art (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017) and Entertaining Ideas (Ma Bibliothèque, 2019). This Little Art is now being translated into five languages; A Table Made Again For the First Time, a collection of artists’, writers’ and translators’ responses to the book, edited by Paul Becker and Francesco Pedraglio, will be published by Juan de la Cosa / John of the Thing in 2021. She is currently working on a book titled The Long Form which finds a philosophy of the novel in the daily lives of a new mother and her baby.

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. This event is generously sponsored by the Princeton University Program in Translation & Intercultural Communication.