Wave on Wave

Installation of George Washington statue (1909) / Image courtesy of UW University Libraries

Within the past few weeks, I visited two superbly organized translation gatherings: Wave Books’ “3 Days of Poetry” in Seattle, and the annual conference of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) in Kansas City. In both places, I met a lot of talented people and heard a lot of great ideas, and I want to be sure I get everything down before I lose my notes or forget key details. I’ll start with the Wave festival in this post, and then I’ll move on to ALTA in the next one.

Wave’s weekend-long festival was held at the University of Washington’s Henry Art Gallery, located just off Red Square (seriously!) and right next to the hulking statue of General Washington himself. The venue certainly gave the festival a welcome aura of artistic inspiration, but I did have a hard time hearing some of the speakers inside the high-ceilinged galleries. Nevertheless, one of the highlights of the weekend took place in those echo chambers: Matthew Zapruder’s conversation with Sarah Valentine about Russian poet Gennady Aygi.

Translation Comes to Seattle

Next month, Wave Books will hold its second annual “3 Days of Poetry” festival at the Henry Art Gallery on the campus of the University of Washington. The first one actually took place in April 2010, during National Poetry Month, so their year seems to have stretched out to about nineteen months. Will the third annual festival be in June 2013?

Since the festival is just up the road from Olympia, I might have gone anyway, but this year’s theme, “Poetry in Translation,” virtually assures that I’ll be there. And the list of participants is impressive. It includes presentations and readings by the likes of Matthew Zapruder, Sarah Valentine, Alissa Valles, and Michael Wiegers, the executive editor of Copper Canyon Press—an institution, like Wave Books itself, that seems to loom genially behind the scenes of the festival.

Perhaps most exciting, the program wraps up on the evening of Sunday, November 6, with “Translators on Translation,” a panel organized in collaboration with Seattle Arts & Lectures. Zapruder will moderate the panel, and the three participants will be Bill Porter (who translates under the pseudonym “Red Pine”), Nikolai Popov, and Peter Cole. Popov, who now teaches at the University of Washington, translated Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man into Bulgarian back in 1981, and Cole, among other things, has translated the selected poems of Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali, who passed away earlier this week.

This promises to be an excellent weekend to spend in Seattle!