William H. Gass Symposium: International Writing
With William H. Matheson lecturer, Professor Susan Bernofsky (Columbia University)
September 23, 2016
Author and translator Susan Bernofsky directs the program Literary Translation at Columbia in the MFA Writing Program at the Columbia University School of the Arts. Among her many published translations are retranslations of Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha (Modern Library, 2006), Franz Kafka's classic black comedy of nightmarish transformation, The Metamorphosis (Norton, 2014), and Jeremias Gotthelf's 19th century tale of horror, The Black Spider (NYRB Classics, 2013). She specializes in the work of the great Swiss-German modernist author Robert Walser – she has translated eight of his books, including Microscripts, Berlin Stories, The Walk,
© Caroline White and Looking at Pictures and is writing his biography. Her new libretto for Mozart’s The Magic Flute premiered in May 2014 at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis in a production by Isaac Mizrahi with choreography by John Heginbotham and conducted by Jane Glover. Her most recent translation, of Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel The End of Days, won the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the 2015 Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize.
In 2014 she was named a Guggenheim Fellow. Her previous awards include the 2006 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize and the 2012 Hermann Hesse Translation Prize of the City of Calw, as well as grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the PEN Translation Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the CUNY Graduate Center, and the Lannan Foundation. From 2011 – 2014 she chaired the Translation Committee of the PEN American Center. Currently she serves on the Board of the American Literary Translators Association. In 2013 she co-edited (with Esther Allen) the Columbia University Press anthology In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means, featuring thoughts on translation by leading voices in the field.
She blogs about translation at www.translationista.net.
For up-to-date information about her latest projects and public appearances, visit her website: www.susanbernofsky.com
Mary Jo Bang is the author of seven books of poems, the most recent of which is The Last Two Seconds (Graywolf Press, 2015). Her other books are Apology for Want (1997), which was awarded the 1996 Bakeless Prize and the 1998 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award; Louise in Love (2001), which received the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award for a manuscript-in-progress; The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans (2001); The Eye Like a Strange Balloon (2004); Elegy (2007), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award; and The Bride of E (2009). She was the poetry co-editor at Boston Review from 1995 to 2005. She’s been the recipient of a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, and a Berlin Prize fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin. She has a B.A. and M.A. in Sociology from Northwestern University, a B.A. in photography from the Polytechnic of Central London, and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Columbia University. Her 2012 translation of Dante's Inferno, with illustrations by Henrik Drescher, was named a Notable Book by both the Academy of American Poets (2012) and by the American Library Association (2013).
Lorin Cuoco co-founded the International Writers Center with William H. Gass and served as its associate director until 2001. She is the editor of six books published during her tenure there including The Writer in Politics, The Dual Muse: the Writer As Artist, the Artist As Writer and Literary St. Louis: A Guide, which she co-wrote with Gass.
Cuoco is a former radio reporter and producer, based in St. Louis. She filed stories on the arts for Morning Edition, All Things Considered and Performance Today, and produced broadcasts for NPR World of Opera. She also produced a weekly poetry program, Ars Poetica, a series of literary profiles and the radio play The Coffee Room by Stanley Elkin. She served as producer of The Tunnel Audiobook as read by the author William Gass published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2006.
Her poetry, interviews and other writings have appeared in Flood Stage: An Anthology of Saint Louis Poets, New Letters, River Styx, Sou’wester, and The Review of Contemporary Fiction among others. She was a Lannan Writer in Residence in Marfa, Texas, in 2002. From 2007 until 2014 she was a consultant for the St. Louis Poetry Center, producing programs featuring the work of Ovid, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, W. B. Yeats, Elizabeth Bishop, and Emily Dickinson.
Matthias Göritz is a German poet, novelist and translator. He is currently the William H. Gass Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis. He was Writer-in-Residence at Bard College, New York, at the “Deutsches Haus” at NYU and guest in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, as well as Max Kade Writer at Washington University.
After publications in magazines, his first volume of poetry, Loops, was published in 2001. He was awarded the Hamburg Literature Prize and the Mara Cassens Prize for his first novel, The Short Dream of Jakob Voss (Berlin 2005). In Fall 2006 his second collection of poetry, Pools, was published. Göritz received the grant of the state of Lower Saxonia for these poems. He was the Winner of the Warsaw Haiku contest 2008. In 2011 Göritz was awarded the Robert Gernhardt Prize. In 2012 his third collection of poems, Tools,came out. In 2013 the novel Dreamers and Sinners was published by C.H. Beck (Munich).
Ignacio Infante is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Spanish at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of After Translation: The Transfer and Circulation of Modern Poetics Across the Atlantic (Fordham University Press, 2013). He has also published two translated books: Una Ola (a Spanish translation of John Ashbery’s A Wave) and Cómo viven los muertos (a Spanish translation of Will Self’s How the Dead Live). His courses at Washington University include World Literature, World-Wide Translation, and the Avant-Garde in Spain: Poetry/Visual Art/Cinema.
Katja Perat’s first poetry collection, Najboljši so padli (The Best Have Fallen), was published in 2011 by Študentska založba (Beletrina collection). In the same year she received the award for the best first-published author at the Slovenian Book Fair, and in 2012 she also received the Book of the Year award presented by the Association of Slovenian Literary Critics. The book was also nominated for the two major Slovenian poetry awards: the Jenko Award and the Veronika Award. Her second poetry collection, Davek na dodano vrednost (Added value tax), was published in 2014 by LUD Lieratura, was critically acclaimed and nominated for Jenko Award, Veronika Award and The Book of the year award. Her poems have been translated into English, Serbian, German, French, Flemish, Spanish, Catalan, and Japanese. They also found their place in an anthology of contemporary Slovenian poetry, Petinsedemdeset pesmi od Dekleve do Peratove (75 poems from Dekleva to Perat), published by Založba Litera in 2013.
Perat has been a guest artist at multiple international literary residencies and literary festivals. In 2013 she toured Japan with three other Slovenian poets (Milan Dekleva, Aleš Šteger and Gašper Bivšek). She is part of a European platform for poetry, Versopolis. She helps with the organization of the festival, Days of Poetry and Wine, hosted by Beletrina publishing house, as a translator from English and a moderator. In the last two years she translated poetry of two British poets: Astrid Alben and Amarjit Chandan, and one American poet: Patrica Goodrich. She also hosted talks with Astrid Alben and Mary Jo Bang. She is the co-founder of the Idiot literary magazine, and she also contributes in the editing of the Slovenian literary magazine Literatura and AirBeletrina, the internet portal of the Študentska založba publishing house. As a literary critic, she writes for several Slovenian newspapers. Between 2013 and 2014, she worked for the Slovenian Ministry of Culture as a counselor in the administration of Dr. Uroš Grilc. She participated in the formation of the national program for culture 2014-2017 and edited the web portal Culture for a Creative EU: Visions by Ministers of Culture for the Role of Culture in the EU.
Stephen Schenkenberg is the editor and publisher of "The Ear’s Mouth Must Move: Essential Interviews of William H. Gass" (www.thegassinterviews.org) and the website Reading William Gass (www.readinggass.org). His writing, including on Gass's fiction and essays, has been published in The Believer, The Quarterly Conversation and St. Louis Magazine, where he was editor-in-chief. Schenkenberg is the editor of three books published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press.
Lynne Tatlock is the Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis, where she is a Professor of German and the Director of the Comparative Literature program. She has published widely on German literature and culture from 1650 to the 1990s with a concentration in the late seventeenth century and the nineteenth century. She has maintained an abiding interest in the novel and its origins, the construction and representation of gender, reading communities and reading habits, nineteenth-century regionalism and nationalism, the intersection between fiction and other social and cultural discourses. Some of her recent publications include books, edited and co-edited volumes, translations, and articles on the seventeenth-century poet Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg, the American translator of E. Marlitt, nineteenth-century American reading of German women’s writing, Gustav Freytag's alternative address to national community, Gabriele Reuter as contributor to the New York Times, new approaches to book history and literary history, reception and the gendering of German culture, and cultural transfer.
Kārlis Vērdiņš was born in 1979 in Riga and graduated in cultural theory from the Latvian Academy of Culture. Vērdiņš has a PhD in Literature from the University of Latvia (2009). Since 2007, he has been working at the Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art of the University of Latvia. He is the author of four poetry collections – Ledlauži (The Icebreakers, 2001), Biezpiens ar krējumu (Cottage Cheese with Cream, 2004), Es (I, 2008) and Pieaugušie (Adults, 2015).
© Liepa Rūce His collected poems under the title Mēs (We) were published in 2012. He is the author of children verse books Burtiņu zupa (Alphabet Soup, 2007) and Tētis (Dad, 2016).
Vērdiņš’ poetry has been translated into several languages and included in several British anthologies. Translations of his poems have been collected in separate books in Russian (2003), Polish (2009), Czech (2013). Vērdiņš' selected poems in English translation, Come to Me, was published by Arc Publications in 2015.
Vērdiņš’ poem "Come to Me" was included in Fifty Greatest Modern Love Poems list, chosen by poetry specialists at the London's Southbank Centre in 2014. In 2001, 2008, and 2015, he received the newspaper Diena Culture Award. Vērdiņš’ is also a recipient of the Poetry Day’s Prize 2008 for the Best Poetry Collection of the year and the Latvian Annual Literary Award in 2007 and 2015.
Vērdiņš has translated the works of T.S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Georg Trakl, Joseph Brodsky, Konstantin Biebl, Lev Rubinstein, and other European and American poets, including Russian poets of Latvia. His publications on literature includes monographs, The Social and Political Dimensions of the Latvian Prose Poem (in English, Pisa University Press, 2010), and Bastarda forma (in Latvian, ILFA, 2011).
Gerhild Williams is the Barbara Schaps Thomas and David M. Thomas Professor in the Humanities in Arts and Sciences, Vice Provost, and Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at Washington University in St. Louis. She has published widely on German and French literature and culture from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Period (1100-1700) specializing more recently in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She has been working in translation theory and practice, the early modern witch phenomenon, the early modern Volksbuch, and the development of the novel. She has explored the impact and influence of newspapers and other early modern media on the production of novels. Some of her recent publications include books, edited and co-edited volumes, translations, and articles on the Prosaromane of Fortunatus, Melusine, Dr. Faustus, Wagner, and on the seventeenth-century writers Johannes Praetorius and Eberhard Werner Happel. Currently, she is working on the influence of Ottoman power and culture on German prose texts and on the globalizing impact of the Ottoman imperial ambition and cultural hegemony during the seventeenth century.
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