Category: Translation

April Events with the Bristol Poetry Institute

Posted on by rebecca.kosick
The Bristol Poetry Institute is involved with a number of events coming up this month. We hope you can join us. All are very welcome!
  • Price: Free
    Time: 18:00 – 19:00
    Join Samantha Walton, Jason Baskin and Cliff Williamson in this panel discussion, chaired by Madhu Krishnan, as they discuss poems of past and present and consider what it really means to ‘write the city’. This event will be BSL interpreted and live captioned. Presented in partnership with Bristol Ideas and Lyra Bristol Poetry Festival.
  • Annual Reading with Denise Riley (21 April)
    Price: Free
    Time: 18:00 – 19:00
    The Bristol Poetry Institute, with the support of the Department of English and School of Modern Languages, are very pleased to present British poet and philosopher Denise Riley as this year’s annual reader. The event will last one hour and comprise of a poetry reading and a question and answer session. A 20-minute book signing with the poet will follow the reading.
  • Watch Words: The Furnivals and Text (as) Art in the Long Sixties (22 April) 
    Price: £5 – £10
    Time: 10:00 – 18:00
    Taking John and Astrid Furnivals’ work as a point of inspiration, this conference will explore the intersection of text and art during the long sixties, considering connections to a range of contemporary cultural, political, economic, and technological concerns.
  • Multilingual Poetry Reading (23 April)
    Price: FreeTime: 15:45 – 16:45
    A special poetry reading featuring multilingual poets in Bristol. English text versions will be projected in the background. The showcase will be headlined by DL Williams, performing work from their collection Interdimensional Traveller, exploring British Sign Language and English. The event will be BSL interpreted. Presented in partnership with Lyra Bristol Poetry Festival.
  • Catalan Poetry Showcase (27 April)
    Price: Free
    Time: 18:00 – 19:00

    The Bristol Poetry Institute, in collaboration with the Institut Ramon Llull and the Department of Hispanic, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies, are pleased to invite you to a showcase of recent Catalan poetry. This one-hour event will feature bilingual readings with English translations of four Catalan poets, with the special collaboration of Dominic Jaeckle, writer and editor of Tenement Press.

Bristol Poetry Institute at Lyra Festival (April)

Posted on by rebecca.kosick
The Bristol Poetry Institute is pleased to once again partner with Lyra, the Bristol Poetry Festival for a series of exciting events this spring. We’d love to see you for any of the below events. All are free and open to the public.

 

April is the cruellest month | The Waste Land Lecture

Date: Friday 1st April 2022

Time: 17:30

Tickets: From £0.00

Venue: Bristol Central Library

To mark this year’s 100th anniversary of The Waste Land, Jim McCue will consider why we are still reading T. S. Eliot’s poem, how our understanding of it has changed, and what was meant by “editing” it as part of a 2,000-page scholarly edition of the poetry.

 

Radical Translation | with Girasol Press

Date: Saturday 9th April 2022

Time: 17:00

Tickets: From £0.00

Venue: Wills Memorial Building (G25), Queens Rd, Bristol BS8 1QE

Radical Translation explores politically and artistically “radical” approaches to poetry in translation, featuring poets and translators published by or connected with Bristol-based small publisher Girasol Press. We’ll hear from Say, Spirit, Sheffield-based poet Alex Cocker’s experimental translations of Michelangelo’s sonnets, which tease out questions of androgyny, queer desire and the “trans” in translation. There will be readings of new work from Latinx poet and translator Juana Adcock, whose poetry explores living between languages and the violence of present-day Mexico, and from the writer and translator Jessica Sequeira, whose fiercely hybrid texts transgress boundaries of language and genre. Lastly, the afternoon will feature video contributions in Ch’ol and Tsotsil, as well as Spanish and English, from three Mexican poets (Canario de la Cruz, Edgar Darinel García, and Miriam Esperanza Hernández Vázquez) included in Jukub: Poems from Chiapas for the Reverse Conquest. Jukub, the Ch’ol word for canoe, alludes to the Zapatista Army of National Liberation’s maritime delegation, which in 2021 sailed to Europe to mark 500 years since the “conquest” of Mexico in 1521. As a publisher, Girasol Press is interested in experimental approaches to translation and in the tactility and radical slowness of book-arts and antiquated print technologies, such as their trusty Adana 8×5!

 

Diana Bellessi | To Love A Woman/Amar a una mujer

Date: Saturday 9th April 2022

Time: 18:30

Tickets: From £0.00

Venue: Wills Memorial Building (G25), Queens Rd, Bristol BS8 1QE

Join Argentinian poet Diana Bellessi and translator Leo Boix to celebrate the publication of To Love A Woman. With support from Polish multilingual poet Bohdan Piasecki. Presented in partnership with the Poetry Translation Centre. Bellessi is a groundbreaking writer who has been credited as the godmother of LGBTQI+ poetry in Latin America. Over the decades she has championed feminist and queer issues and themes, and has exerted a strong influence on prominent poets and writers from the 1980’s through to the present day. Bellessi’s direct, simple aesthetic style was adopted, in part, to speak directly to ordinary people of Argentina over the literary intelligentsia, part of her deep commitment to highlighting the social condition of the working class in Latin America, alongside progressive politics and ecological conservation. A prolific writer, Bellessi has published 25 books and this selection draws from the whole range, charting the progression and evolution of her poetry. Largely untranslated until now, The Poetry Translation Centre is proud to be publishing this collection, many of the poems appearing in English for the first time. Bellessi and Boix will be reading from To Love A Woman in the original Spanish with English translations, and discussing her life and work. While the BPI has not organised this event, we are excited that it continues our engagement with Bellessi and Boix, following a PTC and BPI-hosted translation workshop led by Boix last spring.

 

Poetry Aloud | Featuring Daljit Nagra

Date: Sunday 10th April 2022

Time: 14:00

Tickets: From £0.00

Venue: St. George’s Bristol, Great George St, Bristol BS1 5RR

A free, fun and inspiring afternoon for children, young people and families with top poets and musicians. Children and young people from schools in Bristol and the surrounding areas will perform their chosen poems, old and new, and poems they have written themselves. This event is presented in partnership with Poetry By Heart. Children and young people, aged 7-18, can sign up to perform a poem of their choice by contacting info@poetrybyheart.org.uk. The event will feature special performances from former BPI Annual Reader Daljit Nagra and clare potter, and a poetry and music collaboration by Bob Walton and JOW.

Audio Recording of La gran nàusea Booklaunch 25/10/21

Posted on by rebecca.kosick

On Monday 25 October, 2021, the Bristol Poetry Institute was delighted to host our first in-person event in over a year, featuring a bilingual Catalan/English reading and discussion of La gran nàusea, by Xavier Mas Craviotto. For those not able to attend, we hope you will enjoy this audio recording of the event, introduced by Miguel García Lopez.

Researching Change Through Poetry Translation

Posted on by rebecca.kosick

Join the Bristol Poetry Institute for this interactive workshop and discover more about the relationship between moments of cultural (ex)change and upheaval. With the help of poet and co-director of the Bristol Poetry Institute Rebecca Kosick and Jonny Elling from the University of Bristol’s Department of Modern Languages, try your hand at producing translations of German and Spanish poetry, – no prior knowledge of the languages is required.

This event is co-hosted with Futures: European Researchers’ Night. Head over to their site for more information and a link to book.

Translation workshop with Leo Boix featuring poetry by Diana Bellessi

Posted on by rebecca.kosick
Photo of Diana Bellessi

Date and time: 15 and 22 June, 18:30-20:00 BST

Cost: pay what you can

Register: via Eventbrite

In collaboration with the Poetry Translation Centre, we are very proud to present a workshop on Spanish poetry, focussing on the work of Argentine poet Diana Bellessi. A guide translation is provided by the guest translator so there is no need to know the language being translated, simply sign up and bring your love of language.

This online workshop will take place over two 90-minute sessions on Zoom over two consecutive Tuesdays. This format will let us spend time with a single poetic voice. The workshops will be led by translator Leo Boix.

Diana Bellessi is a poet from the province of Santa Fé in Argentina. Born in 1946, she has become one of the foremost voices in Latin America, her many awards include: 1993 Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry, 1996 Antorchas Foundation fellowship, 2004 Premio Konex, Merit Award, 2007 Fondo Nacional de las Artes, lifetime award in poetry. She is considered to be the godmother of feminist / LGBTQI+ / Lesbian poetry in Argentina and her work demonstrates a deep commitment to progressive politics, ecological conservation and the social condition of the working class in Argentina and Latin America. Her poetry is seen as groundbreaking for its depiction of Lesbian desire and has exerted a strong influence on prominent poets and writers from the 80s and 90s through to the present day.

Leo Boix is a bilingual Latino British poet, translator and journalist based in the UK. He has published two collections in Spanish, Un lugarpropio (2015) and Mar de noche (2017), and was included in many anthologies, such as Ten: Poets of the New Generation (Bloodaxe) and Why Poetry? (Verve Poetry Press). His English poems have appeared widely including in Poetry, The Poetry Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, PNReview and The Rialto. Boix is a fellow of The Complete Works Program and co-director of ‘Invisible Presence’, a scheme to nurture new young voices of Latino poets in the UK. His debut collection of English poetry, Ballad of a Happy Immigrant, will be published by Chatto and Windus in 2021.

For more information, head over to Eventbrite.

Reading and Discussion with Janet Hendrickson and Rebecca Kosick

Posted on by rebecca.kosick

Image of the book covers.

The Bristol Poetry Institute will host, with the Wild Detectives Bookstore in Dallas, TX, this engaging conversation and reading featuring translator Janet Hendrickson and BPI co-director Rebecca Kosick. The event will take place Thursday 14 January from 7:00 PM – 8:00 PM GMT.

Rebecca Kosick and Janet Hendrickson will discuss how writing and translation are inseparable practices during this transatlantic reading from their recent books. Rebecca Kosick’s Labor Day (Golias Books, 2020) is a serial poem set in the postindustrial US Midwest that explores the landscapes of the author’s childhood through the distorted lens of memory. Janet Hendrickson’s Treasure of the Castilian or Spanish Language (New Directions, 2019), an experimental translation of a seventeenth-century dictionary by Sebastián de Covarrubias, turns the original into a series of prose poems. Laura Jansen of the University of Bristol will moderate the conversation.

For more information and to book your place, head over to Eventbrite.

Poetry Translation Workshop with Assiya Issemberdiyeva and Liz Berry

Posted on by rebecca.kosick

In partnership with the Poetry Translation Centre and the Embassy of Kazakhstan in the UK, we are pleased to be hosting a translation workshop on Tuesday 26 January 2021, 18:30-20:30 GMT. This session exploring Kazakh poetry will focus on the work of Yerlan Junis. Junis’s lyrical verses are highly regarded by his literary colleagues for their unexpected surrealist images and expression of human emotions. The session will be led by poet Liz Berry and guest translator Assiya Issemberdiyeva.

This online workshop will take place over Zoom in one two-hour session. In order to make this workshop experience as accessible as possible, pricing is pay-what-you-want. Knowledge of the source language is welcome but not required; the poet/translator-facilitators will support you in crafting your translation.

Follow the link to Eventbrite to book your place now.

Poetry Translation Workshop with Leo Boix

Posted on by rebecca.kosick

The Bristol Poetry Institute, in partnership with the Poetry Translation Centre, are pleased to be hosting a translation workshop with Argentinian/British poet Leo Boix on the evening of 24 March. We’ll be translating Argentinian philosopher and writer Silvina Giaganti, and we’d love for you to join us! Knowledge of Spanish is not required, as workshop participants will receive support in crafting the final, translated poem in English.

For more information and to book your FREE place, click here.