Events

A reading and conversation with Rebecca Kosick and Janet Hendrickson about their recent books, moderated by Laura Jansen . This event is co-hosted with the Bristol Poetry Institute.

1PM CST/7PM GMT (Online event)

This is an online event and registration is required, you can do it here

Translation as Poetry/Poetry as Translation: A Reading and Conversation with Rebecca Kosick and Janet Hendrickson

Rebecca Kosick and Janet Hendrickson discuss how writing and translation are inseparable practices during this transatlantic reading from their recent books. Rebecca Kosick’s Labor Day (Golias Books, 2020) is a serial poem set in the postindustrial Midwest that explores the landscapes of the author’s childhood through the distorted lens of memory. Janet Hendrickson’s Treasure of the Castilian or Spanish Language (New Directions, 2019), an experimental translation of a seventeenth-century dictionary by Sebastián de Covarrubias, turns the original into a series of prose poems. Laura Jansen of the University of Bristol will moderate the conversation.

Rebecca Kosick is the author of Labor Day (Golias Books 2020) and Material Poetics in Hemispheric America: Words and Objects, 1950-2010 (Edinburgh University Press 2020). Her poems and translations of poetry have appeared in venues including the Iowa Review, Fence, The Recluse, and ecopoesia.com. In addition, she has published numerous academic articles and essays addressing 20th century and contemporary poetry in the Americas. Rebecca is a Senior Lecturer in Translation at the University of Bristol, UK, where she also co-directs the Bristol Poetry Institute and runs the Indisciplinary Poetics Research Cluster. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Cornell University.

Praise for Labor Day

“Layered with time and space, littered with the ruins of memory and language, Labor Day provides more questions than answers. Yet…against the repetitive erasure of time, Kosick still finds possibility in iteration.” – Harvard Review

Janet Hendrickson translates from Spanish and Portuguese. Her most recent project, Treasure of the Castilian or Spanish Language (New Directions, 2019), pairs translation and erasure to turn a 1611 dictionary by Sebastián de Covarrubias into a series of lexical poems. This book was longlisted for the 2020 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. She is also the translator of The Future Is Not Ours (ed. Diego Trelles Paz, Open Letter, 2012), an anthology of short stories by young Latin American writers. Other work has appeared in venues including Granta, n+1, Mandorla, and The White Review. She holds a PhD in Romance Studies from Cornell and an MFA in Nonfiction Writing from the University of Iowa. Currently she is a Postdoctoral Fellow of Spanish at the University of Dallas.

Praise for Treasure of the Castilian or Spanish Language

“Hendrickson’s choices poke fun at the arbitrary nature of definition, etymology, translation, and other word work, undermining the idea that any such activity can ever be objective . . . A delightful alchemy of erudite gleanings.” – Harper’s

“Covarrubias’s volume compels modern readers because of its ongoing contradictions and inconsistencies . . . Hendrickson’s volume is powerful because of the way it brings Covarrubias’s dictionary to new audiences: both through its approach to translation as a practice, and through its celebration of the dictionary as a poetic form.” – Public Books

Laura Jansen is Senior Lecturer in Classics & Comparative Literature at the University Bristol. She is author of Borges’ Classics: Global Encounters with the Graeco-Roman World (Cambridge 2018), volume editor of The Roman Paratext: Frame, Texts, Readers (Cambridge 2014) and Anne Carson/ Antiquity (Bloomsbury, 2021), and general editor of Bloomsbury monograph series Classical Receptions in Twentieth-Century Writing. Her next book is on Italo Calvino: Classics between Science and Literature. She is originally from Buenos Aires.

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We are thrilled to have Daniel Loedel with us to discuss his debut novel Hades, Argentina. Daniel will be in conversation with Cristina Rodriguez from Deep Vellum Books. Join us for a great discussion on this amazing literary debut.

This is a virtual event and the conversation will be live streaming through Facebook

Link for the conversation coming soon!

Daniel Loedel is a book editor based in Brooklyn. Hades, Argentina, his first novel, was inspired by his family history.

A decade after fleeing for his life, a man is pulled back to Argentina by an undying love.In 1976, Tomás Orilla is a medical student in Buenos Aires, where he has moved in hopes of reuniting with Isabel, a childhood crush. But the reckless passion that has long drawn him is leading Isabel ever deeper into the ranks of the insurgency fighting an increasingly oppressive regime. Tomás has always been willing to follow her anywhere, to do anything to prove himself. Yet what exactly is he proving, and at what cost to them both?

It will be years before a summons back arrives for Tomás, now living as Thomas Shore in New York. It isn’t a homecoming that awaits him, however, so much as an odyssey into the past, an encounter with the ghosts that lurk there, and a reckoning with the fatal gap between who he has become and who he once aspired to be. Raising profound questions about the sometimes impossible choices we make in the name of love, Hades, Argentina is a gripping, ingeniously narrated literary debut.

“A gorgeously told tale of really tough subjects — terror, betrayal, love, and more.” —Alma

“A complex and intimate meditation on love, guilt, and the decisions that haunt us forever.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“[A] haunting story about repression and the vulnerability of youth. . . . A devastating reminder of the tragic costs of politics made personal.” —Booklist (starred)

“Mesmerizing. . . . Loedel’s unflinching look at human frailty adds a revelatory new chapter to South American Cold War literature.” —Publishers Weekly 

“An astonishingly powerful novel about the complex nature of guilt. It sets the personal against the political with real emotional accuracy and sharp narrative skill.” —Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn and Nora Webster

“A remarkable novel, as imaginatively bold as it is morally complex. It will stay with me for a very long time.” —Kamila Shamsie, author of Home Fire

“Deception, violence, a society on the brink, Hades, Argentina haunted me long after I turned the final page. Loedel is a writer of enormous talent.” —Elliot Ackerman, author of Red Dress in Black and White

“Hades, Argentina brilliantly explores the fault lines between heroism and complicity, guilt and trauma, and love and betrayal. Daniel Loedel has written a haunting and beautiful novel.” —Phil Klay, author of Redeployment

“A stunning descent into the haze of memory and history. In his interrogation of complicity and violence, Loedel explores how institutionalized evil disappears humans not only from the physical world, but from their own souls as well.” —Francisco Cantú, author of The Line Becomes A River

“Strange, gorgeous, and terrifying—a book for the grievers, and for those of us who wish we could turn back time to remedy past mistakes—and so, for all of us.” —R. O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries

“A remarkable novel, personal and political, elegiac and intimate, with a tenderness and wisdom evident in every passage. A beautiful book.” —Dinaw Mengestu, author of All Our Names

“Loedel writes in the venerable Argentinian tradition of mixing the political and the supernatural, but his novel comes from a different language and a new sensibility. It took me to places I had never visited before.”  —Juan Gabriel Vásquez, author of The Sound of Things Falling

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