On Tuesday, December 1st at 6:00pm EST, Pierre Joris, Geoffrey Brock, and Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody joined moderator Mary Ann Caws for a conversation hosted by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery. They discussed their recent translations of Paul Celan’s Memory Rose into Threshold Speech, Guiseppe Ungaretti’s Allegria, and Paul Valéry’s The Idea of Perfection, respectively.
A recording of the event is available here.
Mary Ann Caws is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature, English, and French at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. Her many areas of interest in twentieth-century avant-garde literature and art include Surrealism, poets René Char and André Breton, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group, and artists Robert Motherwell, Joseph Cornell, and Pablo Picasso. Conceptually, one of her primary themes has been the relationship between image and text.
Pierre Joris has written, edited, and translated more than sixty books, including poetry, essays, and anthologies, including Fox-trails, -tails, & -trots (Poems & Proses); Paul Celan: Microliths They Are, Little Stones (Posthumous prose); Arabia (not so) Deserta and, with Adonis, Conversations in the Pyrenees. Joris is the editor and translator of Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry of Paul Celan. In 2005 he received the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for his translation of Celan’s Lichtzwang/Lightduress.
Geoffrey Brock is an American poet and translator. Brock has edited three anthologies on Italian poetry and translated the work of Italo Calvino, Roberto Calasso, Umberto Eco, and others. Brock’s poetry has been featured in several anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2007 , and his books, Weighing Light (2005) and Voices Bright Flags: Poems (2014) have received the New Criterion Poetry Prize and Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, respectively. His translations have appeared in magazines such as Poetry, The Paris Review, and The New Yorker, and he has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Antiquarian Society, the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Florida Arts Council, the Guggenheim Foundation, and Stanford University.
Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody was born in Columbus, Ohio. He has translated the work of French and Belgian poets, including Benjamin Fondane, for which he was awarded the Susan Sontag Prize for Translation. He is the author of two volumes of poetry in French and one in English, and has worked as a typesetter, a programmer, and a private tutor.