Interwoven Worlds:
A Symposium Celebrating the Literature of the Middle East
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
A Queens College Trends in Translation Event
Cosponsored by
The MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation
and Archipelago Books
To celebrate the new collaboration between Queens College and Archipelago Books, the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation presents a one-day symposium on writing and translation. This symposium, which forms part of the Queens College Year of Turkey, will present writers and translators featured in recent Archipelago Books publications as well as others working in the literatures of Turkey, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Palestine and Israel.
Archipelago Books, founded in 2004 and based in Brooklyn, is currently one of the foremost publishers of literature in translation. Archipelago books have received prizes including the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Academy of American Poets Translation Award, and the French-American Foundation/Florence Gould Translation Prize, and have been selected as an NPR Pick for Best Foreign Fiction of the Year. Archipelago’s list of authors includes prominent writers translated from Turkish, Polish, Bengali, Russian, Dutch, Swedish, Japanese, Norwegian, Afrikaans, Hungarian, Brazilian Portuguese, Basque, French, German, Chinese, Korean, Greek, Icelandic and Arabic.
The MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College is one of only two MFA programs in the country to offer a track in literary translation. Further, students specializing in all branches of creative writing are encouraged to study translation, creating a real community of writers who relish diversity and global connections.
Schedule draft*
11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Panel 1: Reading by MFA Students, introduced by Nicole Cooley
12:00 p.m. - l:00 p.m. Lunch break
1:15 p.m. – 2:45 p.m.
Workshop: Editing Translations, introduced by Susan Bernofsky
Participants
Jill Schoolman (Archipelago Books)
Edwin Frank (New York Review Books Classics)
2:45 p.m. - 3:15 p.m. Coffee Break
3:15 p.m. – 4:45 p.m.
Panel 2: The Politics of Translation – On Navigating Cultural (Mis)understandings
Participants
Aron Aji (Turkish)
Sara Khalili (Persian)
Barbara Harshav (Hebrew)
Roger Sedarat, moderator
5:00 p.m. – 6:15 p.m.
Panel 3: The Writer as Translator – Multilingual Writer/Translators on Cross-Pollinations in Their Work
Participants
Sinan Antoon (Arabic/Iraq - translator of Mahmoud Darwish’s In the Presence of Absence [Arabic/Palestinian])
Murat Nemet-Nejat (Turkish)
Ammiel Alcalay (Hebrew/Department of Classical Middle Eastern and Arabic Languages, Queens College)
Susan Bernofsky, moderator
6:30 p.m. - 7:45 p.m. Light Dinner for Participants
8:00 p.m.
Keynote Presentation: Elias Khoury (Arabic/Lebanon): A Writer’s Journey
Followed by a wine reception and book signing.
*NOTE: this is the preliminary schedule. Check closer to date for update.
