National Grad Student Translation Conference

Since I referenced this earlier, and since it’s just a few weeks away, I feel like I should post some information about the National Grad Student Translation Conference that the Center for Literary Translation at Columbia University will be hosting From March 28th through the 30th.

As stated in this press release this is the third biennial translation conference (the first two took place at UCLA and the University of Iowa). All events are free and open to the public, and more info can be found at the Center for Literary Translation website.

I hate to do this, but to fit an image of the conference poster into this column made it basically unreadable, but here’s a link to a pdf version.

The keynote event is a discussion between the Fifteenth Poet Laureate of the United States, Charles Simic and Academic Director of the Center for Literary Translation, Michael Scammell that will take place at Columbia’s Casa Italiana.

A number of the events sound fantastic, especially the opening reading (which Open Letter is actually sponsoring):

Friday, March 28 at 7:30 pm
Philosophy Hall 301

Karen Emmerich, translator of Poems (1945-1971) by Miltos
Sachtouris; Idra Novey, translator of The Clean Shirt of It
by Paulo Henriques Britto; Lisa Lubasch, translator of Paul
Éluard’s A Moral Lesson; Peter Wortsman, a translator of
Heinrich Heine, Robert Musil, and others.

Saturday’s events include roundtables on “Multilingualism and Translation,” “Translation and Publishing,” “Translation and the Academy,” and “Translation and Canon Formation.”

Two roundtable discussions will take place on Sunday: “Translation and Theory” and “Translation Ethics, Censorship, Speaking Out.”

With a stellar list of participates—including Alfred MacAdam, Susan Bernofsky, Eliot Weinberger, Dedi Felman, Jill Schoolman, and many, many more—this should be a really interesting conference. One that I’ll definitely blog about in excruciating detail . . .