EVENT – Monday, Feb. 21, 2011 – Reading the World Conversation Series: Samuel Hazo & Nirvana Tanoukhi

Our first RTW event of the “spring” (I think we’d better keep that term in quotes for a little while longer, especially in Rochester) is coming up in just a few short weeks. See below for all the advance info that’s fit to print.

Reading the World Conversation Series:
Samuel Hazo & Nirvana Tanoukhi

FEBRUARY 21, 2011
Monday, 6:00 p.m.
Plutzik Library, Rush Rhees Library
University of Rochester
(Presented by the Department of English.
Free and open to the public.)

Samual Hazo—author, translator of Lebanese and Palestinian poetry, founder of the National Poetry Forum—will discuss art and translation, and read from his new poetry collection, Like a Man Gone Mad.

Nirvana Tanoukhi—expert in Arab and African literature, fellow at Harvard’s W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research—will dissect “How Translators Became Traitors,” reconsidering the limits and scope of the translator’s agency to broker cultural exchanges.

Then, our guest speakers will join a short roundtable and Q&A about translation and Middle Eastern literature—including John Michael and Dan Beaumont.

Visit this event on Facebook.

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Bios:

Samuel Hazo is the author of more than thirty books of poetry, fiction, essays, and plays. He is the founder and director of the International Poetry Forum in Pittsburg. His most recent volume of poetry is Like a Man Gone Mad. He has also translated the work of Denis de Rougemont and the poems of Adonis and Nadia Tueni. A National Book Award finalist, he was chosen the first State Poet of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and served from 1993 till 2003.

Nirvana Tanoukhi has lived in Lebanon, Liberia, Spain, and the U.S. A fellow at Harvard’s W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, her current work focuses on modern fiction in Egypt, South Africa, Nigeria, and Morocco. She’s co-editor of the essay collection Immanuel Wallerstein & the Problem of the World: System, Scale, Culture, and has translated the Arabic novels Passage to Dusk by Rachid al-Daif and Maryam of the Stories by Alawiyya Subuh.

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(This event is presented by the Department of English at the University of Rochester and hosted by Open Letter, University of Rochester Arts & Sciences, and the Department of English. It is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts.)