Colloquy #10: Translating Avant-Garde Women

BPL Presents welcomes to Brooklyn the tenth installment of Colloquy: Translators in Conversation, with readings and discussion from Emilie Moorhouse, Alex Braslavsky, and Christina Svendsen on translating Avant-Garde women. The event will be moderated by Madhu H. Kaza. 

Colloquy is an event series presented by World Poetry Books in collaboration with Montez Press Radio and partnering event spaces like Brooklyn Public Library and others. The series invites translators to engage with live audiences in an exploration of the art of translation.

---

Participants

Emilie Moorhouse, translator and co-editor of Emerald Wounds: Selected Poems (City Lights Books, 2023), holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia. Raised in a French-speaking household in Toronto, Canada, she now lives in Montreal where she works as a teacher, writer, translator, and environmentalist.  Photo credit Selena Phillips-Boyle

 

 

 

 

 

Christina Svendsen translated Unica Zürn's Trumpets of Jericho and two sci-fi German Expressionist classics by Paul Scheerbart, Lesabéndio: an Asteroid Novel and Clarissa and Munchausen: a Berlin Novel, for Wakefield Press. She is also a scholar who researches the intersection of literature and architectural theory, and currently teaches at Baldwin Wallace University as an assistant professor of German.

 

 

Alex Braslavsky is a poet, translator, and scholar. She is a doctorate student in the Slavic Department at Harvard University, where she writes scholarship on Polish, Czech, and Russian poetry through a comparative poetics lens. Her dissertation centers on women who write poetry into their old age. Her translations of poems by Zuzanna Ginczanka were released with World Poetry Books in February of 2023. Her poems appear and are forthcoming in The Columbia Review, Conjunctions, and Colorado Review, among other journals.

 

Born in Andhra Pradesh, India, Madhu H. Kaza is a writer, translator, artist, and educator based in New York. She is the author of Lines of Flight (forthcoming, Ugly Duckling Presse) and the editor of Kitchen Table Translation, a volume that connects migration to translation, and which features diasporic and BIPOC translators. She worked for several years for the Bard Prison Initiative where she began as the founding director of Bard at Brooklyn Public Library. She teaches translation at Middlebury College's Bread Loaf Conference and in the MFA Writing program at Columbia University.