Transhemispheric Translation: Scenes from Latin American Poetics with Olivia Lott

This talk is organized around case studies of “transhemispheric translation,” a term employed to describe poetic experiments that fundamentally foreground translation—between Spanish and English, Latin America and the United States—for the purpose of negotiating hemispheric power differentials. Beginning in the context of the inter-American Cold War of the late 1960s and early 1970s, this talk demonstrates that translation operated at a space of Cold War power. This context allows for a re-reading of Cold War poetic performances of inter-American contact: the Argentine poet Juan Gelman’s 1969 pseudotranslation of a fake US poet and the Chilean multimedia artist Cecilia Vicuña’s 1973 “untranslation” into English. The talk ends by considering a recent example—non-equivalent self-translations by the Puerto Rican poet Urayoán Noel—to consider how transhemispheric translation continues to function in anti-imperialist fashion today.

Assistant Professor of Spanish & Portuguese (Yale) Olivia Lott is a scholar of modern and contemporary Latin American, Latinx, and hemispheric poetry and poetics, avant-gardes, and translation, with particular emphasis on the 1960s and 1970s. Her book manuscript—Radical Re/Turns: Poetics of Translation in the Latin American Long Sixties—chronicles the revitalization of avant-garde activity across the Latin American continent and within the inter-American Cold War. Her scholarly writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from PMLA, Comparative Literature, Revista Hispánica Moderna, MLN, Translation Studies, and Chasqui.

Part of The Council on Latin American & Iberian Studies' Faculty Spotlight Series
Lunch will be provided.