Daniel Borzutzky & Rachel Galvin '10 | Poetics of Trans/re/lation: Radical Reading, Radical Grammars

Date
Apr 3, 2024, 12:00 pm1:20 pm
Location
PLAS 3rd Floor Atrium, Burr Hall (open to students, faculty, visiting scholars and staff)

Speakers

Details

Event Description

This event includes two short lectures that address the intersections of translation, poetics, and language across multiple points of the American hemisphere. Rachel Galvin’s lecture, “‘ni ne ne ni ne na ni ná’: Queer and Trans Caribbean Poets and the Invention of Language,” examines how trans and queer poets from Puerto Rico and Cuba aim to alter sociolinguistic structures and project more livable worlds. Galvin shows how poetry and (self-)translations by Achy Obejas, üatibirí, and Roque Raquel Salas Rivera diverge from emerging patterns in gender inclusive language, arguing that their work illustrates the significance of writing outside the conventional matrix of linguistic and gender norms. Daniel Borzuztky’s creative/critical hybrid presentation, “Writing Through Radical Reading,” illustrates examples of how his own writing has manifested through what he calls “radical reading:” a process that is sometimes relational, translational, combinatorial, critically or politically responsive, even syntactic or grammatical. Borzutzky will attempt to make sense of what his own response-based poetics looks like, how it’s inscribed into the body, and how it moves between languages and temporalities.

ABOUT OUR GUEST SPEAKERS

Daniel Borzutzky is a poet and translator. His latest book, The Murmuring Grief of the Americas, will be published in August 2024. His other books include The Performance of Becoming Human, winner of the 2016 National Book Award; Lake Michigan (2018) was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize, and Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018(2021). His most recent translation is Paula Ilabaca Nuñez’s The Loose Pearl (2022), winner of the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. His translation of Galo Ghigliotto's Valdivia received the American Literary Translator’s Association 2017 National Translation Award for Poetry, and he has also translated collections by Cecilia Vicuña, Raúl Zurita, and Jaime Luis Huenún. He is an Associate Professor of English and Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago.

Rachel Galvin '10 is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Director of Translation Studies at the University of Chicago. She is the author of News of War: Civilian Poetry, 1936–1945 (Oxford UP) and three poetry collections, most recently Uterotopia (Persea Books). Her translation of Raymond Queneau’s Hitting the Streets (Carcanet) won the Scott Moncrieff Prize for Translation, and her cotranslation of Decals: Complete Early Poetry of Oliverio Girondo (Open Letter Books) was a finalist for the National Translation Award. Her poems and translations appear in Best American Experimental Writing 2020, Best American Poetry 2020, Boston Review, Fence, Harvard Review, McSweeney’s, The Nation, The New Yorker, and Ploughshares. Her criticism appears in Comparative Literature Studies, Critical Inquiry, ELH, Jacket 2, MLN, Modernism/Modernity, and PMLA.

DISCUSSANT

Rachel Price, Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, Princeton University


This event is open to students, faculty, visiting scholars, and staff. Lunch will be available while supplies last.

Sponsor
Program in Latin American Studies, Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication (PTIC)