Please join us for our 2024 PAMLA Forum: Translation and Creativity, on Friday, November 8, starting at 11:45 am in Crosby Ballroom North. Our PAMLA Forum will be a moderated roundtable on various ways of approaching translation: from the art of literary translation, to the joys of adaptation, to creative understandings of text and image.
Our three panelists, Marilyn Chin, Johanna Drucker, and Sholeh Wolpe, will engage in an interdisciplinary examination of these notions through the lenses of poetry, theater, music, and bibliophilia. Coffee, tea, and a light snack included.
Marilyn Chin, Translation and Creative Inspiration: Bold and Subtle Variations
Award-winning poet and author Marilyn Chin will speak of the importance of bold and subtle variation in creative translastion. A self-professed “activist, subversive, radical, immigrant, feminist, transnational Buddhist neoclassical poet…[and] inventor of a fusionist esthetics of bilingual and bicultural hybrid forms,” Chin was born in Hong Kong and raised in Portland, Oregon. Chin’s books of poems include Sage, A Portrait of the Self as Nation, Hard Love Province, Rhapsody in Plain Yellow, and Dwarf Bamboo. She has translated poems by the modern Chinese revolutionary poet Ai Qing and co-translated poems by the Japanese poet Gozo Yoshimasu.
Johanna Drucker, From Text to Type
Johanna Drucker, Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies Emerita in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA, will speak about translations from text to type. Drucker is internationally known for her work in the history of graphic design, typography, experimental poetry, fine art, and digital humanities. Her most recent book, Inventing the Alphabet, was published in 2022. Other new titles include Visualization and Interpretation and Iliazd: Meta-Biography of a Modernist. Drucker is also known for her artist‘s books which were the subject of a traveling retrospective, Druckworks: 40 Years of Books and Projects, in 2012-2014.
Sholeh Wolpé, Translation/Re-creation/Resurrection: Poetry, Music, Theatre
Sholeh Wolpé, an Iranian-American poet, playwright, and librettist, will speak about translation and re-creation in her creative works. Her most recent works include Abacus of Loss: A Memoir in Verse, and Song of Exile (Part II). Forthcoming works include: Attar: The Invisible Sun; Abaco de Perdida; and Nava Avaz, a full length opera for 6 composers. Wolpé’s translations of the twelfth-century Sufi mystic poet, Attar, The Conference of the Birds, and of the twentieth-century Iranian rebel poet Forugh Farrokhzad, Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad, have garnered awards and established Wolpé as a re-creator of Persian poetry in English.