The Poet Translator: "At last the language becomes really foreign"

In celebration of UGA's Spotlight on the Arts, the English Department and the Creative Writing Program are pleased to present an afternoon of discussions and readings by three visiting poets, who are also deeply engaged in the practice of literary translation.

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SCHEDULE

1PM Panel Discussion at Park Hall Library, Room 261
Dr. Andrew Zawacki will moderate a panel that will include three very talented guests as they discuss the relationship between translation and their creative processes.
Featuring: Lau Cesarco Eglin, Vivek Narayanan & Jake Syersak

3PM Poetry Reading at Graduate Reading Room, Third Floor Main Library
We welcome Lau Cesarco Eglin, Vivek Narayanan & Jake Syersak to campus to read from their original works of poetry. 
 

Visiting Practitioners of Poetry & Translation

Lau Cesarco Eglin

Vivek Narayanan 2024-2025 Diann Blakely Visiting Poet

Jake Syersak

Biographies

Laura Cesarco Eglin is a poet and translator from Uruguay. She is the author of three collections of poetry and four chapbooks, including Between Gone and Leaving--Home (dancing girl press, 2023), Time/Tempo: The Idea of Breath (PRESS 254), and Reborn in Ink, translated by Catherine Jagoe and Jesse Lee Kercheval (The Word Works, 2019). Cesarco Eglin translates from the Spanish, Portuguese, Portuñol, and Galician. She is the translator of claus and the scorpion by the Galician author Lara Dopazo Ruibal (co•im•press, 2022), longlisted for both the 2023 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and the 2023 National Translation Award in Poetry. Cesarco Eglin is also the translator of Of Death. Minimal Odes by the Brazilian author Hilda Hilst (co•im•press), winner of the 2019 Best Translated Book Award in Poetry. She co-translated from the Portuñol Fabián Severo’s Night in the North (Eulalia Books, 2020). Her translation of Gabriela Aguirre's The Mistaken Place of Things is forthcoming from Eulalia Books). She is the co-founding editor and publisher of Veliz Books and teaches creative writing at the University of Houston-Downtown.

Vivek Narayanan’s most recent books of poems are After (New York Review Books / HarperCollins India, 2022) and The Kuruntokai and its Mirror (Hanuman Editions, 2024).  His work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem and The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poetry. He has held fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute and at the New York Public Library and teaches in the MFA Poetry program at George Mason University.

Jake Syersak is the author of the poetry books Yield Architecture and Mantic Compost. He is also the translator of several works by Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine, most recently Proximal Morocco—. His translation of Tahar Ben Jelloun's collected early poetry, Sun Scars, is forthcoming in 2025. His work has received grants from The National Endowment of the Arts and PEN/Heim. He currently lives in Olympia, WA.