translation

Track

Yi Sang. Yi Sang: Selected Works. Edited by Don Mee Choi; translations from the Japanese by Sawako Nakayasu. Seattle: Wave Books, 2020.

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Yi Sang. Yi Sang: Selected Works. Edited by Don Mee Choi; translations from the Japanese by Sawako Nakayasu. Seattle: Wave Books, 2020.

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Nakayasu, Sawako. Some Girls Walk Into the Country They Are From. Seattle: Wave Books, 2020, p. 61-62.

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Levertov, Denise. The Freeing of the Dust. New York: New Directions, 1975.

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Strand, Mark, translator. Looking for Poetry: Poems by Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Rafael Alberti and Songs from the Quechua. New York: Knopf, 2002.

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Wilbur, Richard. The Mind Reader. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, 1976.

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Wilbur, Richard. The Mind Reader. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, 1976.

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Wilbur, Richard. The Mind Reader. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, 1976.

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Bidart, Frank. In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1990.

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Herrera, Juan Felipe. Akrilica. 1989. Edited and translated by Farid Matuk, Carmen Giménez, and Anthony Cody. Noemi Press, 2022.

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Herrera, Juan Felipe. Akrílica. Edited by Farid Matuk, Carmen Giménez, and Anthony Cody. Noemi Press, 2022.

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Herrera, Juan Felipe. Akrílica. Edited by Farid Matuk, Carmen Giménez, and Anthony Cody. Noemi Press, 2022.

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Herrera, Juan Felipe. Akrílica. Edited by Farid Matuk, Carmen Giménez, and Anthony Cody. Noemi Press, 2022.

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Herrera, Juan Felipe. Akrílica. Edited by Farid Matuk, Carmen Giménez, and Anthony Cody. Noemi Press, 2022.

Track

Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu. The Ink Dark Moon. Edited and translated by Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1988, pp. 3, 35, 38.

The second poem is read from the 1990 Vintage paperback edition and does not appear in the 1988 edition.

Track

Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu. The Ink Dark Moon. Edited and translated by Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1988, pp. 41-43, 54, 63, 116.

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Foerster, Jennifer Elise. The Maybe-Bird. Brooklyn: The Song Cave, 2022.

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Foerster, Jennifer Elise. The Maybe-Bird. Brooklyn: The Song Cave, 2022.

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Rekdal, Paisley. West: A Translation. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2023.

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Yanyi. Dream of the Divided Field. New York: One World, 2022.

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Nakayasu, Sawako. Say Translation Is Art. Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020, pp. 13-16.

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Cesar, Ana Cristina. At Your Feet. Trans. Brenda Hillman and Helen Hillman with Sebastião Edson Macedo. Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, 2018. 

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Fuit, Aleksander. Foreword. Czesław Miłosz in Postwar America, by Ewa Kołodziejczyk. Trans. Michał Janowski. Warsaw/Berlin: De Gruyter Poland Ltd, 2020, p. xii.

Track

Uncollected.

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Uncollected.

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Uncollected.

Reading

Richard Wilbur reads poems that will be collected in The Mind Reader (1976) as well as poems from Walking to Sleep (1969). He also reads several translations from both volumes, of poems from the French by Voltaire and François Villon, and from the Russian by Andrei Voznesensky and Nikolai Moishen. 

Reading

Adam Zagajewski reads from Tremor (1985) and Solidarity, Solitude (1990). He also reads early drafts of translations of poems that would go on to be collected in Canvas (1991); most differ from those that appear in the published version of the book (translated by Renata Gorczynski, Benjamin Ivry, and C.K. Williams).

Reading

Heather McHugh reads poems appearing in To the Quick (1987) and Shades (1988). She also reads her translations of Blaga Dimitrova, which are collected in the book Because the Sea is Black (1989).

Reading

Robert Mezey reads primarily from The Door Standing Open: New and Selected Poems, 1954-1969 (1970). He opens the reading with a selection of poems from poets he admires, including Yehuda Amichai, César Vallejo, and W.S. Merwin.

Reading

W.S. Merwin reads widely from his work. He also reads dreams transcribed and translated by anthropologist Robert M. Laughlin. Used with permission of the Wylie Agency LLC.

Reading

María Elena Wakamatsu reads from her work as the recipient of the inaugural Mary Ann Campau Memorial Fellowship for Southern Arizona Writers.

Reading

With intense emphasis and concentration, Frank Bidart reads the first two poems and the long last poem of his collected works, In the Western Night (1990).

Reading

Christopher Burawa reads from The Small Mystery of Lapses (2006). He also reads uncollected and unpublished poems, including translations of poems by Icelandic poet Jóhann Hjálmarsson. This reading was originally given alongside Ofelia Zepeda for the inaugural Tucson Festival of Books.

Reading

Yehuda Amichai reads widely from his extensive body of work, reading some poems in both English and Hebrew. Several translations (including translations of poem titles) performed here differ from the translations collected in his books.

Reading

Lila Zemborain and Rosa Alcalá present their work as part of the Poetry Center's Fall 2009 sequence of themed readings, "Oh Earth, Wait for Me: Conversations about Art and Ecology." In the first half of the reading, Zemborain reads poems in Spanish and Alcalá reads their translations in English. Next, Alcalá reads her own poems. The performance closes with a poem read simultaneously in English and Spanish.

Reading

Iraqi poet Sinan Antoon reads from his collection Baghdad Blues and uncollected translations of many more poems. He concludes the reading with a performance of a poem in Arabic.

Reading

At this tribute to Gustaf Sobin, a US-born poet who lived and wrote in Provence for more than 40 years, Sobin's translator Tedi López Mills reads one of Sobin's longer poems in English as well as her translation of the poem into Spanish. She is introduced by Jeffrey Miller.

Reading

Mexican poet Tedi López Mills reads from her work in Spanish at the 2010 Tucson Festival of Books, accompanied by her translator, Wendy Burk, who reads the poems in English. The reading includes work from an unpublished bilingual manuscript of López Mills's selected poems.

Reading

This reading begins with Olga Broumas reading her translations of the Greek poet Odysseas Elytis. Sometimes performing poems in Greek and sometimes performing in English, Broumas experiments with the delivery of each translation and reads one poem by moving between Greek and English as she reads. Broumas also reads from five of her own books: Beginning With O, Pastoral Jazz, Soie Sauvage, Caritas, and Perpetua.

Reading

In this reading, Robert Bly treats the audience to translations of Issa, Neruda, and Kabir more than five years before they began to be collected in his books. He also reads uncollected poems and poems from his book The Light Around the Body, which was published the year following this reading.

Reading

Gary Snyder reads poems that would go on to be collected in The Back Country (1968) and talks about his experiences in Japan. He also reads one section of his long work Mountains and Rivers Without End (1996).

Reading

In this bilingual reading, Alex Dunkel reads English translations of Aleksandr Yudakhin alongside the author. Yudakhin was flown from the Soviet Union to read in Tucson with the help of Soviet and Russian Studies, UA Poetry Center, UA Office of International Programs, the Soros Foundation, and Tucson Pima Arts Council. The English translations read were created by Alison Hawthorne Deming and Alex Dunkel. They were created ad hoc to provide context for those who were not familiar with the Russian language and are not considered to be definitive.

Reading

Mexican poet Homero Aridjis reads work reflecting his environmental activism and engagement with Mexican history, drawn from his 2001 bilingual publication Ojos de otro mirar / Eyes to See Otherwise: Selected Poems. The English translations of Aridjis's poems (by Eliot Weinberger, George McWhirter, and Betty Ferber) are read aloud by Alison Hawthorne Deming.

Reading

John Frederick Nims reads from Knowledge of the Evening (1960) and Of Flesh and Bone (1967); he also reads translations of poems by St. John of the Cross and Catullus. 

Reading

Sherwin Bitsui reads from his work in English and Navajo as part of a multilingual poetry reading also featuring Alberto Rios (reading in English and Spanish) and Ofelia Zepeda (reading in English and O'odham). The reading includes selections from Water, an artist book created by Karla Elling to commemorate the Poetry Center's 50th anniversary. "Water" features a chainlink of poetry composed and translated by Bitsui, Rios, Zepeda, and Zapotec poet Natalia Toledo.

Reading

Ofelia Zepeda reads from her work in English and O'odham as part of a multilingual poetry reading also featuring Alberto Rios (reading in English and Spanish) and Sherwin Bitsui (reading in English and Navajo). The reading includes selections from Water, an artist book created by Karla Elling to commemorate the Poetry Center's 50th anniversary. "Water" features a chainlink of poetry composed and translated by Bitsui, Rios, Zepeda, and Zapotec poet Natalia Toledo.

Reading

Alberto Ríos reads from his work in English and Spanish as part of a multilingual poetry reading also featuring Ofelia Zepeda (reading in English and O'odham) and Sherwin Bitsui (reading in English and Navajo). The reading includes selections from Water, an artist book created by Karla Elling to commemorate the Poetry Center's 50th anniversary. Water features a chainlink of poetry composed and translated by Bitsui, Ríos, Zepeda, and Zapotec poet Natalia Toledo.

Reading

Colloquium on translation featuring poets Lila Zemborain and Rosa Alcalá.

Reading

In this reading, originally given with Joni Wallace, Mary Jo Bang reads poems that would go on to be collected in The Last Two Seconds (2015) as well as a segment from her translation of "Canto III" of Dante's Inferno (2012).

Reading

Jeffrey Yang reads from An Aquarium (2008), Vanishing-Line (2011), and his translation of Liu Xiaobo's June Fourth Elegies (2012).

Reading

Franz Wright discusses a wide range of topics, including Rilke, translation, and the writing life.

Reading

Jeffrey Yang, of New Directions Press, lectures on his experiences as a poet, translator, and editor.

Reading

Cynthia Hogue reads poems from Or Consequence (2010), When the Water Came: Evacuees of Hurricane Katrina (2010), and The Incognito Body (2006). She also reads excerpts from Virginie LaLucq and Jean-Luc Nancy's Fortino Sámano: The Overflowing of the Poem (2012), which she translated with Silvain Gallais. This reading was originally given with Kate Bernheimer.

Reading

Rodney Phillips speaks about illustrations and English translations of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. This reading was originally given with Rae Armantrout.

Reading

Tomas Tranströmer reads translations of poems that first appeared in For the Living and the Dead (För levande och döda, 1989). Some poems are performed in Swedish and English. In the question and answer session that follows the reading, Tranströmer discusses the collaborative nature of the translation process.

Reading

Poetry Center Summer Resident Anne Shaw reads from Undertow (2007) and from a manuscript of poetic translations of the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. This reading was originally given with Melissa Buckheit and Karen Rigby.

Reading

Poet-translators Pura López-Colomé and Forrest Gander give bilingual performances of poems from Science and Steepleflower (1998) and No Shelter: The Selected Poems of Pura López-Colomé (2002).

Reading

Tedi López Mills reads poems from While Light Is Built (2004) with translations read by Wendy Burk.

Reading

Semezdin Mehmedinović reads poems from Sarajevo Blues (1998) and Nine Alexandrias (2003).

Reading

Michel Deguy reads poems from Given Giving (1984) and Recumbents (2005) in the original French, with translations read by Reginald McGinnis.

Reading

George Reavey reads from The Colours of Memory (1955), Quixotic Perquisitions (1932) and The New Russian Poets, 1953-1966 (1966), as well as uncollected work.

Reading
Michael Collier reads primarily from The Folded Heart (1989), The Neighbor (1995), and The Ledge (2000). He also reads his translations of the work of Mexican poet José Emilio Pacheco.
Reading

In the inaugural reading of the Hannelore Quander-Rattee Translation Series, Geoffrey Brock presents translations of the work of Giovanni Pascoli, Patrizia Cavalli, and César Vallejo, along with original poems.

Reading

Rosario Ferré reads from her poetry and fiction, frequently alternating between English and Spanish.

Reading
Heriberto Yépez reads excerpts from his poem A Brochure on Futureless Science Fiction Poetics. This reading was originally given with Richard Siken and Camille Dungy for the Next Word in Poetry Series.
Reading

James Thomas Stevens reads poems from Combing the Snakes from His Hair (2002), as well as poems that would later be collected in A Bridge Dead in the Water (2007). This reading was originally given with Matthea Harvey and Olena Kalytiak Davis for the Next Word in Poetry Series.

Reading

Taha Muhammad Ali reads primarily from his book So What (2006) in the original Arabic, with Peter Cole reading each poem's translation in English.

Reading

In this lecture, Heather McHugh discusses the design and impact of the ends of poems, including close readings of powerful last lines including examples from the work of Emo Philips, Abd-ar-Rahman III, Su Tung-po, Anthony Hecht, D.H. Lawrence, Paul Valéry, Alan Dugan, Julio Cortázar, Louis Simpson, Samuel Beckett, and John Frederick Nims.

Reading

Garrett Hongo reads from and discusses a cycle of poems written from the point of view of Kubota, a figure based on his maternal grandfather. He also reads poems written by Japanese internees at a detention center in Santa Fe during the 1940s.

Reading
Richard Exner reads from his poems in the original German. Each of Exner's readings in German is followed by an English translation read by David Chisolm and Marie Ingram.
Reading

Italian writer Paolo Valesio reads poems in English translation. He opens the reading with "In Memoriam" from La Rosa Verde (1987) in the original Italian.

Reading

This reading was originally scheduled as a joint appearance by Brazilian poet Adélia Prado and her translator Ellen Doré Watson, but Prado was unable to travel due to health issues. Watson thus reads her translations of Prado's poetry, as collected in The Alphabet in the Park: Selected Poems (1990), and plays recordings of Prado reading some of her poetry in the original Portuguese.

Reading

Tomaž  Šalamun reads from poems written throughout his career, some of them translated into English by poets such as Bob Perelman and Charles Simic, others read in his native Slovenian.

Reading

Richard and Nora Marks Dauenhauer read from their English translations of Tlingit poems and stories, providing fascinating explanations of the traditions behind the literature. They read first the original Tlingit and then the English translations. They conclude by reading from their own original poems.

Reading

Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig read for the Writers At Work Series. Wittig and Zeig team to play the parts of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in a play written by Wittig and translated by Zeig, Le Voyage sans fin (The Constant Journey, 1985), based on Miguel de Cervantes's classic novel. Before performing the play, Wittig gives a brief talk explaining the role of transposition and gender roles in her adaption of Cervantes's work.

Reading

Luci Tapahonso reads from her collections Seasonal Woman (1982) and A Breeze Swept Through (1987), beginning with a piece that combines spoken poetry with song.

Reading

Miguel M. Méndez reads from poems translated by Pulitzer Prize–nominated poet and translator Valerie Martínez during the time when Martínez was an MFA student at the University of Arizona. Méndez reads the poems in Spanish, then Martínez reads her English translations. Poems include "Moon," "Legend of the Breeze," "Saguaros," and "Workshop of Images."

Reading
Roland Flint, Poet Laureate of Maryland at the time of this reading, opens with early poems from Say It (1979) and Resuming Green (1983). Flint reads from his National Poetry Series volume Stubborn (1990), interspersing work from Stubborn with recently written poems, some of which would go on to be published in Easy (1999). Flint also discusses his work as a translator of Bulgarian and reads several of his translations.
Reading

Jerome Rothenberg performs a retrospective survey of his prolific body of work, beginning with poems written in the 1960s and continuing in chronological order. Most of the poems read here are collected in Eye of Witness: A Jerome Rothenberg Reader (2013). 

Reading

Srikanth Reddy reads from a manuscript in progress titled "Underworld Lit."

Reading

Poet and translator Marilyn Hacker reads from her collections Names (2010) and A Stranger's Mirror (2015). She also reads from her translations from the French of works by poets Vénus Khoury-Ghata and Claire Malroux.

Reading

Wendy Burk discusses and reads from her translation of Tedi López Mills' Against the Current (2016) and her own first collection of poems, Tree Talks: Southern Arizona (2016). This reading was originally given with Renee Angle.

Reading

Forrest Gander reads widely from his translations from the Spanish, including poems by Coral Bracho, Alfonso D'Aquino, Pura López Colomé, Nezahualcóyotl, and Jaime Saenz. He also reads from his translations of Pablo Neruda's rediscovered works, published as Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda Poems (2016).

Reading

Cynthia Hogue reads from In June the Labyrinth (2017). She also reads (along with her co-translator, Sylvain Gallais) two poems by Nicole Brossard, translated from the French. This reading was originally given with Johanna Skibsrud.

Reading

Sawako Nakayasu mixes her poetry and her translations, crafting a reading that she describes as a translation of the innovative form of her book Mouth: Eats Color (2011). She reads her own poems from The Ants (2014) and Some Girls Walk Into the Country They Are From (2020), a manuscript in progress that would be published two years after this reading. She also reads translations of poems by Japanese modernist Chika Sagawa from Mouth: Eats Color and Korean modernist Yi Sang, later published in Yi Sang: Selected Works (2020). 

Reading

Daniel Borzutzky reads from his translations of Raúl Zurita's Song for His Disappeared Love (2010) and Country of Planks (2015), as well as Galo Ghigliotto's Valdivia (2016). He also reads from his own poetry collection Lake Michigan (2018) and a manuscript titled Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018.

Reading

Myriam Moscona reads with Jen Hofer and John Pluecker of Antena Aire, a language justice and language experimentation collaborative. The three give an interactive presentation while reading from both their translated and original works. 

Reading

Rosa Alcalá reads from her translations of Cecilia Vicuña's poetry presented in New and Selected Poems of Cecilia Vicuña (2018). She also reads uncollected poems of her own. This reading was given as part of the Hannelore Quander-Rattee Works-in-Translation Series.

Reading

Anthony Cody reads from his collection Borderland Apocrypha (2020), which comprises of visual, research-based poems centered on citizenship, the history of racial violence against Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the American West, and ecopoetics. Cody also shares an original video piece paired with an uncollected poem, as well as a translation of a Juan Felipe Herrera poem that invites audience participation. This reading was originally given alongside Mai Der Vang

Reading

Former U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera begins with English and Spanish readings from Akrílica (2022), trading languages with translator Farid Matuk. Together, they also read Herrera’s poem "i am not a paid protestor," which Herrera terms a "duo poem" for two voices in dialogue with one another. Herrera closes out the reading with poems and remarks about mass shootings, classical music, space exploration, and human suffering and connection.

Reading

Poet and performance artist Cecilia Vicuña joins with poets and translators Daniel Borzutzky and Rosa Alcalá to read at Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson in honor of Vicuña's exhibit Sonoran Quipu. Borzutzky and Alcalá both read forthcoming work, as well as pieces by Vicuña they have translated into English. Vicuña reads and improvises from Spit Temple (2012), a selection of past performances transcribed, edited, and translated by Alcalá.

Reading

Jane Hirshfield reads from her ninth collection of poems, Ledger (2020), which meditates on the cascading effects of climate change and the griefs of contemporary human life. In recognition of National Poetry Month, she opens with "The Poet" from The Lives of the Heart (1997) and selections from The Ink Dark Moon (1988), her translations of Classical Period Japanese poets Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu. She closes with uncollected new work.

Reading

Paisley Rekdal presents from West: A Translation (2023), a documentary hybrid work centered on the Transcontinental Railroad, the Chinese Exclusion Act, and racism in America. Rekdal shares video poems from the book's companion website and reads the essays corresponding to those poems. She shapes her reading around topics selected by the audience: labor, Mormons, Chinese death rituals, Robert Smithson (creator of Spiral Jetty on the Great Salt Lake), the biracial experience, prostitution, and Hollywood's portrayal of women and the railroad.

Reading

Sawako Nakayasu reads work stemming from her 2017 return to the United States from Japan and the challenges of being immersed again in the violence of American culture. She opens with several new ant poems before reading from Say Translation Is Art (2020), Some Girls Walk Into the Country They Are From (2020), Pink Waves (2023), and her forthcoming book Settle Her. This reading was presented in collaboration with the American Literary Translators Association and as part of the ALTA46 conference.

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