LE LIVRE EST SUR LA TABLE—Challenges of Translating Poetry

[above L to R: Eric M.B. Becker, Kathleen Heil, John Keene, Yasmine Seale, and Yolande Schutter]

Literary translation is already a special and frequently under-recognized art form. Translating poetry offers additional challenges. We will present brief readings of poetry written in Arabic, French, German, and Portuguese—in their original languages and as translated into English—followed by a conversation about the work and unique problem solving that went into creating their English language versions.

Join the Flow Chart SpaceFoundation for a very special reading and discussion featuring four exceptional translators of poetry and the Digital Director and Senior Editor from Words Without Borders.

Our translators:

Kathleen Heil, translating from German

John Keene, translating from Portuguese

Yolande Schutter, translating from French

Yasmine Seale, translating from Arabic

The discussion will be led by Eric M.B. Becker, ‘Digitial Drector and Senior Editor for Words Without Borders.

The event will also be audio live-streamed through WGXC (“Radio for Open Ears”), our streaming partner.

This program has been produced in collaboration with Words Without Borders and Art Omi: Writers with partial funding from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and with support from Friends of The Flow Chart Foundation.

Please consider adding a donation when you reserve your free ticket for this event!

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Eric M.B. Becker is a writer and literary translator, as well as digital director and senior editor of Words Without Borders. The recipient of fellowships and residencies from the NEA, Fulbright Commission, and Louis Armstrong House Museum, he earned a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for his translation of a collection of short stories from the Portuguese by Neustadt Prize for International Literature and 2015 Man Booker International Finalist Mia Couto. He has published translations of numerous writers from Brazil, Portugal, and Lusophone Africa. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, The Literary Hub, Freeman’s, and Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, among other publications.

Kathleen Heil is a writer/translator and choreographer/performer originally from New Orleans living in Berlin since 2015. She is the translator of The Loveliest Vowel Empties, Meret Oppenheim’s collected poems (World Poetry Books, 2023), and the recipient of grants for her work as a literary translator from the National Endowment for the Arts, Berlin Senate, and German Translators’ Fund. Her translations also appear in The New Yorker, BOMB, The Threepenny Review, and other journals. Her debut poetry collection will be published by Moist Books in the UK later this year.

John Keene is the author, co-author, and translator of a handful of books, including Annotations (1995) and Counternarratives (2015), both published by New Directions. Counternarratives received an American Book Award, a Lannan Literary Award, a Republic of Consciousness Prize (UK), and a Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. His most recent publication, Punks: New & Selected Poems (The Song Cave, 2021), received the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry, the Thom Gunn Award from the Publishing Triangle and a 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. A 2018 MacArthur Fellow, he is Distinguished Professor and serves as department chair at Rutgers University-Newark.

Yolande Schutter recently completed her PhD at the University at Albany with a focus on postcolonial Algerian poetry and translation. Her poetry and her translations have been featured in Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of North African Literature, Eleven Eleven, Rattapallax, and CELAAN Revue du Centre d’Études des Littératures et des Arts d’Afrique du Nord. She was co-Editor of the University of Oxford book Marivaudage: théories et pratiques d’un discours. She is currently teaching creative writing.

Yasmine Seale‘s work includes poetry, translation, criticism and visual art. Among her translations from Arabic are The Annotated Arabian Nights (W. W. Norton, 2021) and Something Evergreen Called Life, a collection of poems by Rania Mamoun (Action Books, 2023). She is the co-author of Agitated Air, a collaboration with Robin Moger responding to the visionary poet and metaphysician Ibn Arabi (Tenement Press, 2022). She has held fellowships at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris and at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She currently teaches at Columbia University.