6:30pm
Great Lakes Commonwealth of Letters
758 Wealthy St SE
Grand Rapids MI 49503
Literature is a way of communicating, just like speech. How does translation impact what is trying to be communicated? Join us here at GLCL on Wednesday, August 5, at 6:30 p.m., as our panel discusses the issues, challenges, and joys of creating communication from one language to another. The topic of the event is our experiences with translating literature--what it's like to work with a foreign literature and culture and try to bring it to a western reading audience. This event is free!
Ian Haight is a writer, educator, and consultant to students, professionals in education, and schools. As writer, Ian was a co-organizer and translator for the United Nations' Dialogue on Poetry series in Pusan, Korea; was given a Citation for Translation Excellence from the Korea Literary Translation Institute (KLTI); and has won five grants from KLTI, the Daesan Foundation, and the Baroboin Buddhist Foundation to translate, publish, and edit classical Korean poetry and Buddhist literature.
Ian will discuss the revision process for "Seeing Beyond this World," a poem by Korean poet, Nansorhon.
The Dominican poet Rebeca Castellanos has a Ph.D. in Spanish from the University of Texas at Austin, and is Assistant Professor at Grand Valley State University, in Michigan. In the 1990’s, she became a founding member of the Miami-based literary group El caballo verde. Castellanos has published the books Eva 2000 (2000) and Sueños de Nebuhla(2005).
Médar Serrata is an Associate Professor of Spanish at Grand Valley State University. Born and raised in the Dominican Republic, Serrata migrated to the United States in 1989. Has published two collections of poems. Médar will discuss the translation of the poem "Yelidá," by Tomás Hernández Franco.
Diane Rayor is Professor of Classics at Grand Valley State University in the department that she co-founded in 2000. She has published six book translations of ancient Greek poetry and drama, including Sappho (Cambridge University Press, 2014); Euripides' 'Medea' (Cambridge, 2013); Sophocles' 'Antigone' (Cambridge, 2011); Homeric Hymns (California, updated 2014). Her definitive translation of Sappho was positively reviewed in the New Yorker and New York Review of Books, and she is currently translating Euripides’ Helen. Diane will talk about translating one of two new poems by Sappho discovered on papyrus in 2013; Sappho sang her songs on the island of Lesbos in Greece around 600 BCE.
Matthew Landrum's translations have recently appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, Asymptote Journal, RHINO, and Southern Humanities Review. In 2011 and 2014, he was a fellow at Fróðskaparsetur Føroya (University of the Faroe Islands). He is poetry editor of Structo Magazine.
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