Activist Translation
Channel: HowlRound Theatre Commons
Date: 2020-09-15

PEN America, the Center for the Humanities at CUNY Graduate Center, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library presented Activist Translation livestreamed on the global, commons-based, peer produced HowlRound TV network at howlround.tv on Tuesday 15 September 2020 at 9:00 a.m. PDT (San Francisco, UTC -7) / 11:00 a.m. CDT (Chicago, UTC -5) / 12:00 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4) / 17:00 BST (London, UTC +1) / 01:00 KST (Seoul, UTC +9).

Join us for Week 19 of Translating the Future as we continue our series of conversations between translators with “Activist Translation,” with Anton Hur, Sevinç Türkkan, and Jen Hofer.

Moving between languages is, inevitably, a political process, one that involves many forms of advocacy. Whether that means translating writers whose work is censored in their own languages and countries, promoting language justice locally within multilingual urban communities, or making choices within the text of a translation that challenge preconceived notions and advocate for new perspectives, translators, even those who may not be quite conscious of this fact, are activists.

Speaker Bios
Anton Hur was born in Stockholm and currently divides his time between Seoul and Incheon. A graduate of the Korea University College of Law and a person of distinguished service to the nation, he has worked as a queer rights activist and currently manages the Korean literary translation collective Smoking Tigers. He has won a PEN Translates award and a PEN/Heim translation grant for his books for Honford Star, and has other translations forthcoming from Tilted Axis Press, Verso Books, Feminist Press, Moonji Books, and Pegasus Books.

Sevinç Türkkan is a visiting assistant professor at Oberlin College where she teaches courses in comparative literature and translation studies. She specializes in cross-cultural studies (contemporary Turkish and German literatures and cultures), translation theory and practice, postcolonial studies, gender and women studies, and psychoanalytic thought. Her publications have appeared in Reading in Translation, Comparative Literature Studies, Public Seminar, Türkisch-deutsche Studien Jahrbuch, Translation and Literature, Teaching Translation, Critical Essays on Orhan Pamuk, Global Perspectives on Orhan Pamuk, Post-1960 Novelists in Turkey, International Journal of the Humanities, and elsewhere. She is the co-editor (with David Damrosch) of Approaches to Teaching the Works of Orhan Pamuk (MLA 2018). Her translation of The Stone Building and Other Places by Aslı Erdoğan was a finalist for the 2019 PEN Translation Prize. Currently, she is at work on a book manuscript titled Translation, Criticism, and the Construction of World Literature.

Jen Hofer is a Los Angeles-based poet, translator, interpreter, teacher, knitter, book-maker, public letter-writer, urban cyclist, and co-founder of the language justice and language experimentation collaborative Antena Aire and the local language justice advocacy collective Antena Los Ángeles. Jen has received fellowships and awards from CantoMundo, the Academy of American Poets, the City of Los Angeles, the NEA, and PEN American Center, and is the 2021 visiting Holloway Professor in Poetry and Poetics at UC Berkeley. Jen publishes poems, translations, and visual-textual works with numerous small presses, including Action Books, Counterpath Press, Kenning Editions, Ugly Duckling Presse, and in various DIY/DIT incarnations. Jen’s most recent books are translations by Mexican writers Dolores Dorantes, Myriam Moscona, and Rodrigo Flores Sánchez; translations of Uruguayan poet Virginia Lucas will be published in 2020 by Litmus Press. en el entre / in the between: Selected Writings from Antena Aire will be published in 2020 by The Operating System.

About this Conference and Conversation Series
Translating the Future launched with weekly hour-long online conversations with renowned translators throughout the late spring and summer and will culminate in late September with several large-scale programs, including a symposium among Olga Tokarczuk's translators into languages including English, Japanese, Hindi, and more.

The conference, co-sponsored by PEN America, the Center for the Humanities at The Graduate Center CUNY, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, with additional support from the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, commemorates and carries forward PEN's 1970 World of Translation conference, convened by Gregory Rabassa and Robert Payne, and featuring Muriel Rukeyser, Irving Howe, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and many others. It billed itself as "the first international literary translation conference in the United States" and had a major impact on US literary culture.

The conversations are hosted by Esther Allen & Allison Markin Powell.