Calendar Alert: Adam Zagajewski in Vermont, Sept. 17

from the Vermont Studio Center website:
First Annual Literature in Translation Forum

Lowe Lecture Hall, Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT
Friday, September 17, 8:00 p.m.
The first annual Literature in Translation (LiT) Forum, co-sponsored by the Vermont Studio Center (VSC) and the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW), will feature Polish poet Adam Zagajewski and his translator Clare Cavanaugh. The two internationally recognized writers will present a joint bi-lingual reading and will discuss translation as it relates to literature, and, more broadly, to creative work across genres, media, and cultures. They will also be available for a question and answer period and a book signing.

Mr. Zagajewski is one of the most well-known and highly regarded poets in Europe and the United States. After September 11, The New Yorker published his poem, “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” on its back page – a rare departure from the cartoons and parodies that usually occupy that space. In 1992 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. His most recent books in English are Eternal Enemies (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2008) and Without End: New and Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2003), which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of a book of essays and literary sketches, Two Cities: On Exile, History and the Imagination (1995), and Solidarity, Solitude: Essays (1990). He now lives part of the year in Krakow, Poland, and he teaches at the University of Chicago.

Clare Cavanaugh is a professor of Slavic and Comparative Literatures at Northwestern University, and the former president of ALSCW. She is a prize-winning translator of Polish poetry including Adam Zagajewski and Nobel Laureate Wislawa Szymborska. Her most recent scholarly book is Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West (Yale University Press). She has received the PEN/Book of the Month Club Translation Prize, the MLA William Riley Parker Prize, the AATSEEL Prize for Outstanding Scholarship in Slavic, and Guggenheim, ALSC, and SSRC Fellowships for her work on Russian and Polish poetry. Her work has appeared in Literary Imagination, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, TLS, and The New Republic.

The LiT program was launched in 2009 as a natural extension of the 25 year tradition of welcoming international artists to the Vermont Studio Center. Month-long residencies, as well as public forums featuring distinguished writers and translators are both part of the LiT program. The forum on September 17 is free and open to the public; and it is equipped with an Assistive Listening Device. Reservations are encouraged but not required. For more information about the forum or local accommodations, contact Gary Clark.