Upcoming Kundiman Events:
The Transit between Everything:
translation and fiction
With Bonnie Chau
January 20th–March 10th, 2022
Thursdays, 6:30–9:00 PM ET
“People have a tendency to think about language as belonging to certain people, to certain bodies, to certain places, geographies, situations. We have all operated under these assumptions. Of course the siloing of languages is also connected to forming communities, creating safety; new languages have been developed out of necessity for these things. There are just a lot of power dynamics and structures in place to consider. It’s never neutral.”
—Bonnie Chau, Electric Literature:“7 Literary Translators Whose Work You Should Read”
"Say I bend, I love, I stretch, I break. // Say I bend language translation, I love language translation, I stretch language translation, I break language translation," writes poet/translator Sawako Nakayasu in her treatise Say Translation Is Art. What's the connection between writing and translating? When is writing translating, and translating writing? What happens when you do both? How can reading about translation, and reading and writing translations, inform your own original writing?
Each week we will be discussing assigned readings, as well as engaging in various exercises and activities, to help us think more deeply about the shapes, sounds, and textures of our own storytelling and language usage. Participants will have the opportunity to select literary texts of any genre/language to translate into English, and to workshop their for-practice, for-play translations two times, each time submitting up to two pages of work. In advance of workshopping, you will be asked to read your fellow classmates’ submitted translations carefully and curiously, and be prepared to engage in a respectful and open-minded group discussion with the translator about their intentions, desires, difficulties, and questions.
Readings, provided online and/or through PDFs, will include texts by: Kwame Anthony Appiah, Mirene Arsenios, James Baldwin, Jorge Luis Borges, Don Mee Choi, Mónica de la Torre, Linh Dinh, Keith Donnell, Édouard Glissant, Madhu Kaza, John Keene, Ursula K. Le Guin, Marie Mutsuki Mockett, Sayako Nakayasu, Octavio Paz, Paisley Rekdal, Gayatri Spivak, Amy Tan, Yoko Tawada, Jeremy Tiang, Cecilia Vicuña, and Esmé Weijun Wang.
eligibility:
This workshop is open to all writers of color, and students must be able to attend all 8 sessions of the workshop. This class will be held over Zoom. There is one scholarship spot available, and the application is open through Thursday, January 6th.
Registration for this class is now closed.
FACULTY:
Bonnie Chau is the author of the short story collection All Roads Lead to Blood (2018), which was a finalist for a CLMP Firecracker Award, and her writing has appeared in Flaunt, The Offing, Nat. Brut, The Felt, Two Lines, Fence, Bennington Review, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA in fiction with a joint concentration in literary translation from Columbia University, where she also teaches translation. She has received support from Kundiman, Art Farm Nebraska, Vermont Studio Center, Millay Colony, the Black Mountain Institute, and the Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts. She previously worked in independent bookstores and at the nonprofits 826LA and Poets & Writers, and is currently the literature-in-translation section co-editor at Public Books and a member of the board of directors of the American Literary Translators Association.