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Pursuing the Impossible: Poetry and the Art of Translation

Saturday, May 6 | 2:30 PM - 3:30 PM

The Marsh Berkeley - Cabaret

  • Poetry

Forrest Gander, Olivia Sears

Voltaire once claimed, “It is impossible to translate poetry. Can you translate music?” If that’s true, these talented translators have certainly achieved the impossible—in this session, they’ll share insights into how they did so. Olivia Sears, founder of the Center for the Art of Translation, took on a challenge not only of language but also of design with her translation of Italian Futurist poet Ardengo Soffici’s Simultaneities and Lyric Chemisms. Presented like a facsimile edition, complete with the original fonts, Soffici’s work in Sears’s translation brims with the promise of modernity and the metropolis. In Names and Rivers, co-translators Tomoyuki and Forrest Gander bring the work of influential contemporary Japanese poet Shuri Kido to English for the first time, in a bilingual edition that introduces readers to poems deeply engaged with nature and time. Sears and Gander will read from their translations and also engage in conversation—moderated by CJ Evans, poet and editorial director of Two Lines Press—about the unique (if not impossible) challenges and rewards that poetry grants the translator.

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Book signing information: Marcus Books, at the venue

Moderator:

CJ Evans
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