Language as Polis
Channel: HowlRound Theatre Commons
Date: 2020-08-25

Center for the Humanities at CUNY Graduate Center presented Language as Polis livestreamed on the global, commons-based, peer produced HowlRound TV network at howlround.tv on Tuesday 25 August 2020.

Languages are often identified with the countries where they are spoken, but for many languages there is no one-to-one correspondence with any nation or state; the borders are unclear, contested, or unrecognized. How do speakers and students of such languages define themselves, engage with history, and examine the linguistic and cultural continuity embedded in them? What is the place and role of non-native speakers in these language communities? What does translation mean for them? How do these languages alter or enrich the languages and literatures that absorb or surround them? Join us for a conversation that explores Yiddish, Frisian, Catalan and beyond. Sponsored by the Yiddish Book Center.

Guest co-host, Tess Lewis.

Madeleine (Mindl) Cohen is the academic director of the Yiddish Book Center (Amherst, MA). Her work includes directing a fellowship program for emerging Yiddish literary translators as well as publishing and promoting Yiddish literature in translation. She is the translation editor of the annual Pakn Treger Digital Translation Issue and former chief editor and current president of the board of directors of In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies. She received her PhD in comparative literature from the University of California, Berkeley.

Mary Ann Newman translates from Catalan and Spanish. She has published fiction by Quim Monzó, non-fiction by Xavier Rubert de Ventós, and poetry by Josep Carner. Her most recent translation is Private Life, a 1932 Catalan classic by Josep Maria de Sagarra (Archipelago Books), for which she won the Premi J. B. Cendrós 2017 from Òmnium Cultural and the 2017 North American Catalan Society Prize. She is currently translating another book of poetry by Josep Carner. She was awarded the Creu de Sant Jordi in 1998. She is the founding Director of the Farragut Fund for Catalan Culture in the U.S., the President-Delegate of the Premi Internacional Catalunya, a member of the board of the Catalan Institute of America. She recently organized the first online Sant Jordi NYC Festival of Literature in Translation.

A writer, vocalist, and sound artist, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs is the author of TwERK (Belladonna, 2013), a collection of poems, songs, and myths, and the cofounder and coeditor of Coon Bidness and SO4. Her work has appeared in many publications, including Rattapallax, Nocturnes, Spoken Word Revolution Redux, Ploughshares, Mandorla, P.M.S., jubilat, Everything But the Burden, ART21 Magazine, Palabra, and Fence. Her interdisciplinary work has been featured at MoMA, the Walker Art Center, Modern Museum of Fort Worth Texas, and the 2015 Venice Biennale. As an independent curator, artistic director, and producer, LaTasha has produced literary/musical events for Lincoln Center Out of Doors, BAMCafé, Black Rock Coalition, David Rubenstein Atrium, and El Museo del Barrio. A native of Harlem, Diggs is the recipient of numerous awards, including the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the Laundromat Project, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Japan–United States Friendship Commission, and Creative Capital.

Tess Lewis is a writer and translator from French and German. Her translations of Walter Benjamin, Maja Haderlap, Philippe Jaccottet, Christine Angot and others have received several awards including the 2016 ACFNY Translation Prize, the 2017 PEN Translation Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She has written on European literature for World Literature Today, Partisan Review, The American Scholar, Bookforum, among other journals. She is an Advisory Editor for The Hudson Review and a curator of Festival Neue Literature, New York City’s annual festival of German language literature in English.

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.