Conversation & Series

Translating the Future: “Queer Literature, Queer Legacies: Looking Toward the Future of LGBTQ Translation” with Achy Obejas and Sean Gasper Bye, moderated by Elizabeth Rose

Tue, Jun 30, 2020

1:30 PM–2:30 PM

Livestream via HowlRound; Register for link below

Watch the recording of this conversation here:

Join us for Week 8 of Translating the Future as we continue our series of conversations between translators with “Queer Literature, Queer Legacies: Looking Toward the Future of LGBTQ Translation” with Achy Obejas and Sean Gasper Bye, moderated by Elizabeth Rose.

What strategies might inform our practice of translating queer literature and what are the ethical implications of doing so? How might we draw on our own experiences of U.S. queer cultures in our work, and how might doing so reinforce American queer cultural hegemony? What structures might we as queer translators and writers want to build together in the future? Join us as we seek to move beyond issues of representation to discuss projects and processes related to queer literature in translation.

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, June 30, 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:

Achy Obejas is the author of The Tower of the Antilles, which was a PEN/Faulkner finalist, and several other books of fiction. Her first full book of poetry, Boomerang, will be published by Beacon Press in a bilingual edition in 2021. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area and writes and edits synopses for Netflix with a brilliant group of people.

Sean Gasper Bye; photo by Julia Sanches.

Sean Gasper Bye is a translator of Polish literature, most recently by Małgorzata Szejnert, Szczepan Twardoch and Remigiusz Ryziński. A native of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, he studied modern languages at University College London and international studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies. He spent five years as Literature and Humanities Curator at the Polish Cultural Institute New York. He is a winner of the Asymptote Close Approximations Prize and a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowship.

Elizabeth Rose is a literary translator and Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. They translate from German and Spanish, and their scholarship centers the intersections of translation, queer theory, and transnational American studies. Their work has appeared in Alchemy, Tupelo Quarterly, RaspaMagazine, and Cagibi, among other places.

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.