Madhu Kaza on Lines of Flight with Youmna Chlala, Jacqui Cornetta, Yasmine Seale & Mónica de la Torre

BPL Presents welcomes Madhu H. Kaza who presents her latest work, Lines of Flight, with Youmna Chlala, Jacqui Cornetta, Yasmine Seale, and Mónica de la Torre.

Join us for an evening of collaborative performance and experiments in error based on Lines of Flight, Madhu H. Kaza's chapbook on translation and transformation. Lines of Flight takes a turn through the realm of flowers, mountains, and history, wandering through a landscape of translation shaped by delight in error. The work follows echoes and associative logics across cultures and eras, from ancient Greece to thirteenth-century Japan to sixteenth-century Mexico to our own time, in an attempt to unfix translation and celebrate the ongoingness of language.

---

PARTICIPANTS

Madhu H. Kaza was born in Andhra Pradesh, India, and works in New York City as a writer, translator, artist, and educator. She is the author of Lines of Flight and the editor of Kitchen Table Translation, a volume that explores connections between translation and migration. She is a translator of contemporary Telugu women writers, including Volga and Vimala, and her guest curation of writing from less translated languages appeared as a special feature in the Summer/Fall 2022 issue of Gulf Coast. She worked for several years for the Bard Prison Initiative, most recently as Assistant Dean of the Bard Microcolleges. She remains a faculty associate at the Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College and teaches translation at Bread Loaf and in the MFA program at Columbia University.

 

 

Youmna Chlala was born in Beirut and is based in New York. She is the author of the poetry collection, The Paper Camera (Litmus Press) and recipient of an O. Henry Award. Her artwork investigates fate and architecture through drawings, photographs, sculptures and installations. Chlala exhibited at the Hayward Gallery, Drawing Center, Wanås Konst, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Henie Onstad, Concrete Gallery, Hessel Museum, Fridman Gallery and MAK Center for Art and Architecture. She participated in the Croatian Pavilion of the 60th Venice Biennale, 33rd Bienal de São Paulo, LIAF Biennial in Norway and 11th Performa Biennial. Chlala is the co-editor of the Spatial Species series at Coffee House Press and a Professor in Writing and Humanities & Media Studies at the Pratt Institute.

Jacqui Cornetta is an interdisciplinary artist, working with text, translation and sound. Their writing and translations from Spanish have appeared in Words Without Borders, Circumference, Lost & Found, The Puerto Rico Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. Three Visions, a record which they're currently adapting into an opera, will be released in summer 2025 with their harp/electronics/voice project Settimo Cielo.

 

 

 

 

Yasmine Seale is a poet and translator. Her essays on literature, art and film can be found in Harper’s, The Nation, The Paris Review, 4Columns, and elsewhere. Among her translations from Arabic are The Annotated Arabian Nights (W. W. Norton) and Something Evergreen Called Life, a collection of poems by Rania Mamoun (Action Books). Other books include Agitated Air, a collaboration with Robin Moger responding to the visionary poet and metaphysician Ibn Arabi. She is currently a Visiting Professor at Columbia University. Photo credit Marie d'Origny

 

 

 

Mónica de la Torre’s seven poetry books include Pause the Document, just out from Nightboat, Repetition Nineteen, The Happy End/All Welcome, and two collections in Spanish published in her native Mexico City. Among other anthologies, she co-edited Women in Concrete Poetry 1959–79 and is the recipient of a 2022 Creative Capital grant and the 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts C.D. Wright Award for Poetry. She teaches poetry and translation at Brooklyn College's Creative Writing MFA program. Photo credit Nat Ward