Translational Catastrophes / Translating Catastrophe
This creative/critical hybrid presentation will illustrate examples of how translator Daniel Borzutzky's work has evolved through translational catastrophes and catastrophes of translation. Borzutzky will discuss translations and writing projects that he has worked on, and the ways that they have come together through a response-based poetics that is "inscribed" into the body as it moves between languages and temporalities.
A reception will take place starting at 5:45 p.m., followed by Borzutzky's talk at 6 p.m.
About the speaker:
Daniel Borzutzky is a poet and Spanish-language translator from Chicago. His most recent books are The Murmuring Grief of the Americas (2024) and Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018 (2021). His 2016 collection, The Performance of Becoming Human, received the National Book Award. Lake Michigan (2018) was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. His most recent translations are Cecilia Vicuña’s The Deer Book (2024) and Paula Ilabaca Nuñez’s The Loose Pearl (2022), winner of the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. His translation of Galo Ghigliotto's Valdivia received the American Literary Translator’s Association’s 2017 National Translation Award, and he has also translated collections by Raúl Zurita and Jaime Luis Huenún. He teaches in English and Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago.