- This event has passed.
Jacob Rogers on The Last Days of Terranova with Eric Banks
January 24, 2023 @ 7:00 pm
Join us for a conversation on the practice of translation and often-intertwining literary and political history with translator Jacob Rogers and Eric Banks. They will discuss the translation of Manuel Rivas’s novel The Last Days of Terranova. The event will take place at McNally Jackson Seaport on January 24th at 7:00 pm. You can register for the event here — RSVPs are required.
Jacob Rogers is a translator of Galician and Spanish poetry and prose. He has received grants from the National Endowment of the Arts and the PEN/Heim Translation Fund, as well as winning the Poetry in Translation Prize from Words Without Borders and the Academy of American Poets. He has helped coordinate two features of Galician-language writing, in Words Without Borders and Asymptote, and his translations have been featured in a variety of publications. His translation of Carlos Casares’s novel, His Excellency, was published by Small Stations Press in 2017.
Eric Banks is director of the New York Institute for the Humanities. He is the former editor in chief of Bookforum and a former senior editor of Artforum. He is a past president of the National Book Critics Circle. Banks is consulting editor of the digital Robert Rauschenberg catalogue raisonné.
The Last Days of Terranova tells of Vicenzo Fontana, the elderly owner of the long-standing Terranova Bookstore, on the day it’s set to close due to the greed of real-estate speculators. On this final day, Vincenzo spends the night in his beloved store filled more than seventy years of fugitive histories. Jumping from the present to various points in the past, the novel ferries us back to Vicenzo’s childhood, when his father opened the store in 1935, to the years that the store was run by his Uncle Eliseo, and to the years in the lead-up to the democratic transition, which Vicenzo spent as far away from the bookstore as possible, in Madrid. Like the bookstore itself, The Last Days of Terranova is a space crammed with stories, histories, and literary references, and as many nooks, crannies, and complexities, brought to life in Rivas’s vital prose.