Colloquy on Retranslating the Canon with Mary Jo Bang, Yasmine Seale & Kimi Traube
Please join World Poetry Books and the Brooklyn Public Library’s BPL Presents for the latest installment of Colloquy: Translators in Conversation, featuring retranslations of canonical texts, with readings and discussion from Mary Jo Bang, Yasmine Seale and Kimi Traube. Bang will read from her translations of Dante and Seale will read from her translation of One Thousand and One Nights; and Traube will read from her translation of Don Quixote, followed by a conversation. This event will be moderated by Colloquy curator C. Francis Fisher.
In 2013, award-winning poet Mary Jo Bang translated the Inferno into English in a moment when popular culture proved so prevalent that it has even taken Dante and turned him into an action-adventure video game hero. Dante, a master of innovation, wrote his poem in the vernacular, rather than in literary Latin. Bang has similarly created an idiomatically rich contemporary version that is accessible, musical, and audacious. A cornerstone of world literature and a monument to the power of storytelling, the Arabian Nights has inspired countless authors, from Charles Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe to Naguib Mahfouz, Clarice Lispector, and Angela Carter. In their lavishly designed and illustrated 2021 edition of The Annotated Arabian Nights, acclaimed literary historian Paulo Lemos Horta and the brilliant poet and translator Yasmine Seale presented a splendid new selection of tales from the Nights, featuring treasured original stories as well as later additions including “Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp” and “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” and definitively bringing the Nights out of Victorian antiquarianism and into the twenty-first century. In 2022, Columbia Magazine called Kimi Traube’s new translation-in-progress of Don Quixote “masterful,” adding: “The new translation . . . will inevitably capture not just the art of Cervantes but also the cultural and historical moment in which the translation was produced.”
Since the fall of 2022, World Poetry's Colloquy event series has provided a forum for translators to engage with live audiences to explore the art of translation. Each Colloquy event presents a group of two to four translators of recently published works for short readings and extended conversations followed by Q&As with the audience. Colloquy events are broadcast on Internet radio for broader access by our collaborators at Montez Press Radio. Transcripts of the live discussions have been published in Hopscotch and Asymptote.
PARTICIPANTS
Mary Jo Bang is the author of nine books of poems—including A Film in Which I Play Everyone (Graywolf 2023), nominated for a Lambda Literary Award, A Doll for Throwing (Graywolf 2017) and Elegy (Graywolf 2007), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has published translations of Dante’s Inferno, illustrated by Henrik Drescher (Graywolf 2012), and Purgatorio (Graywolf 2021). Paradiso is forthcoming in July 2025. She is also the translator of Colonies of Paradise: Poems by Matthias Göritz (TriQuarterly Books 2022), and co-translator, with Yuki Tanaka, of A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi, forthcoming from Princeton University Press Lockert Poetry in Translation Series in 2024. She is a Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. Photo credit Carly Ann Faye
C. Francis Fisher received her MFA in poetry from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, The Yale Review, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. Her poem, "Self-Portrait at 25", was selected for the 2021 Academy of American Poets Prize. She has been supported by fellowships from The Bread Loaf Writers Conference and the Vermont Studio Center. She curates Colloquy, an event series that provides a forum for translators to engage with live audiences in an exploration of the art of translation. In the Glittering Maw is her first book of translations.
Yasmine Seale is a writer and translator. Her essays on literature, art and film have appeared in Harper’s, The Nation, Paris Review, 4Columns and elsewhere. Among her translations from Arabic are The Annotated Arabian Nights (W. W. Norton), described by the New Yorker as “an electric new translation”, and Something Evergreen called Life, a collection of poems by the Sudanese writer and activist Rania Mamoun (Action Books). She is currently a Visiting Professor at Columbia University.
Kimi Traube is a writer and translator from the Spanish. Her prose has been featured in Electric Literature, Bomb Magazine, Asymptote Journal, the Best of the Net Anthology, and elsewhere. In 2015, she completed her MFA at Columbia and drew praise from The L.A. Times and The New York Times for her translation of Juan Villoro's collection, The Guilty. She has taught at Columbia, Bard, Breadloaf, and elsewhere. Her new translation of Cervantes's classic Don Quixote is forthcoming from Norton Books.
BPL Presents programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
Please join World Poetry Books and the Brooklyn Public Library’s BPL Presents for the latest installment of Colloquy: Translators in Conversation, featuring retranslations of canonical texts, with readings and discussion from Mary Jo Bang, Yasmine Seale and Kimi Traube. Bang will read from her translations of Dante and Seale will read from her translation of One Thousand and One Nights; and Traube will read from her translation of Don Quixote, followed by a conversation. This event will be moderated by Colloquy curator C. Francis Fisher.
In 2013, award-winning poet Mary Jo Bang translated the Inferno into English in a moment when popular culture proved so prevalent that it has even taken Dante and turned him into an action-adventure video game hero. Dante, a master of innovation, wrote his poem in the vernacular, rather than in literary Latin. Bang has similarly created an idiomatically rich contemporary version that is accessible, musical, and audacious. A cornerstone of world literature and a monument to the power of storytelling, the Arabian Nights has inspired countless authors, from Charles Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe to Naguib Mahfouz, Clarice Lispector, and Angela Carter. In their lavishly designed and illustrated 2021 edition of The Annotated Arabian Nights, acclaimed literary historian Paulo Lemos Horta and the brilliant poet and translator Yasmine Seale presented a splendid new selection of tales from the Nights, featuring treasured original stories as well as later additions including “Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp” and “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” and definitively bringing the Nights out of Victorian antiquarianism and into the twenty-first century. In 2022, Columbia Magazine called Kimi Traube’s new translation-in-progress of Don Quixote “masterful,” adding: “The new translation . . . will inevitably capture not just the art of Cervantes but also the cultural and historical moment in which the translation was produced.”
Since the fall of 2022, World Poetry's Colloquy event series has provided a forum for translators to engage with live audiences to explore the art of translation. Each Colloquy event presents a group of two to four translators of recently published works for short readings and extended conversations followed by Q&As with the audience. Colloquy events are broadcast on Internet radio for broader access by our collaborators at Montez Press Radio. Transcripts of the live discussions have been published in Hopscotch and Asymptote.
PARTICIPANTS
Mary Jo Bang is the author of nine books of poems—including A Film in Which I Play Everyone (Graywolf 2023), nominated for a Lambda Literary Award, A Doll for Throwing (Graywolf 2017) and Elegy (Graywolf 2007), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has published translations of Dante’s Inferno, illustrated by Henrik Drescher (Graywolf 2012), and Purgatorio (Graywolf 2021). Paradiso is forthcoming in July 2025. She is also the translator of Colonies of Paradise: Poems by Matthias Göritz (TriQuarterly Books 2022), and co-translator, with Yuki Tanaka, of A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi, forthcoming from Princeton University Press Lockert Poetry in Translation Series in 2024. She is a Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. Photo credit Carly Ann Faye
C. Francis Fisher received her MFA in poetry from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, The Yale Review, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. Her poem, "Self-Portrait at 25", was selected for the 2021 Academy of American Poets Prize. She has been supported by fellowships from The Bread Loaf Writers Conference and the Vermont Studio Center. She curates Colloquy, an event series that provides a forum for translators to engage with live audiences in an exploration of the art of translation. In the Glittering Maw is her first book of translations.
Yasmine Seale is a writer and translator. Her essays on literature, art and film have appeared in Harper’s, The Nation, Paris Review, 4Columns and elsewhere. Among her translations from Arabic are The Annotated Arabian Nights (W. W. Norton), described by the New Yorker as “an electric new translation”, and Something Evergreen called Life, a collection of poems by the Sudanese writer and activist Rania Mamoun (Action Books). She is currently a Visiting Professor at Columbia University.
Kimi Traube is a writer and translator from the Spanish. Her prose has been featured in Electric Literature, Bomb Magazine, Asymptote Journal, the Best of the Net Anthology, and elsewhere. In 2015, she completed her MFA at Columbia and drew praise from The L.A. Times and The New York Times for her translation of Juan Villoro's collection, The Guilty. She has taught at Columbia, Bard, Breadloaf, and elsewhere. Her new translation of Cervantes's classic Don Quixote is forthcoming from Norton Books.
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