With guest speakers Christopher Maurer and James Nolan
October 21st, 2021 (3:30pm-5:00pm Boston | 21:30 - 23:00 Madrid)
This session welcomes two acclaimed literary translators who will each address various aspects of the English translation of Spanish poetry and its reception in the U.S., with special focus on the work of Spanish poet Jaime Gil de Biedma. The writer James Nolan will discuss his own approach to poetic translation through his work Longing, an anthology of his English translations of Gil de Biedma–who was himself a translator of T.S. Eliot and deeply influenced by British verse. Nolan will also touch on the influence of Spanish-language poetry on his own writing, particularly that of Pablo Neruda, a poet he has also translated. Professor Christopher Maurer will focus on the process of reviewing Spanish poetry in English translation, addressing questions such as who writes reviews of translated poetry, what purpose these reviews serve, and how they contribute to both the knowledge of a poet and the art of the translator.
C. Maurer is Full Professor of Spanish at Boston University, where he teaches and writes about Spanish literary translation, textual criticism, and poetry. He has edited and translated works by Salvador Dalí, Federico García Lorca, Baltasar Gracián, Jorge Guillén, Joan Margarit, and Miguel de Unamuno, among others, and is co-editor of Lorca’s complete letters. A member of the Real Academia Española and the Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española, Maurer has been awarded with Spain’s Orden de Isabel la Católica. J. Nolan is a widely published poet, fiction writer, essayist, and translator, and holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley. His translations from Spanish include Pablo Neruda’s Stones of the Sky and Longing: Selected Poems of Jaime Gil de Biedma. His recent book, Flight Risk: Memoirs of a New Orleans Bad Boy Bad Boy won the 2018 Next-Generation Indie Book Award for Best Memoir.
Language: English