&Now 2019 Conference

How can translation be used in collaborative forms to go beyond spatial and geographical borders? Four panelists share their process of elevating narratives through multi-lingual partnerships.

In "Translationally Original," translator-writers Ali Araghi and Poupeh Missaghi will discuss collaborative projects that use experimental translational/transnational frameworks in order to provide new possibilities for addressing personal and political concerns. Each will share their approaches, one going inward to the depths of the text and the other going outward and beyond. Similarly, one using new technologies and the other using analog modes of communication to bridge geographical distance. While each of them finds various points of entry to create diffused multi-layered labyrinths where the original creators, writer-translators, and audience from different points of a historical continuum converge.

Presenting a bilingual performance drawn from Italian poet Amelia Rosselli's Obtuse Diary, Riccardo Pieri and Deborah Woodard will share the poet’s intimate, and deliberately oblique story of her return to a postwar Italy. They will explore more than the process of a back and forth explication of the original Italian, and rather pursue various ways to enact the fissures and conjoining’s of Italian and English, through switching off between who reads which language and reading simultaneously, with background murmuring in both languages, in an attempt to get to the presence of other tongues in Rosselli's work.