Celebrate Recently Published Works by Yale Graduates

The Yale Translation Initiative
invites you to the second in a series of translation events
celebrating recently published works by Yale graduates

Wednesday, February 5th
The Comparative Literature Library, 8th Floor, Bingham Hall, 5:30 pm

Gwendolyn Harper, YC ‘15
A Last Supper of Queer Apostles: Selected Essays
&
Alice Yang, YC ‘19, GSAS ‘30
Abounding Freedom

“I speak from my difference,” wrote Pedro Lemebel, an openly queer writer and artist living through Chile’s AIDS epidemic and the collapse of the Pinochet dictatorship. In brilliantly innovative essays—known as crónicas—that combine memoir, reportage, fiction, history, and poetry, he brought visibility and dignity to sexual minorities, the poor, and the powerless. This volume brings together the best of his work, introducing readers of English to the subversive genius of a literary activist and queer icon whose acrobatic explorations of the Santiago demimonde reverberate around the world. London Magazine wrote of Queer Apostles: “A literary explosion . . . Lemebel’s writing is beautiful and vicious, and Harper has done a brilliant job translating it.”

Gwendolyn Harper is a writer and translator of Latin American literature. She won a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a Work in Progress grant from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation for A Last Supper of Queer Apostles, which was recently nominated for the National Book Critics’ Circle Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize. She holds a B.A. from Yale and an MFA from Brown University.

Pedro Lembel (1952-2015) is considered one of the most important queer writers of twentieth-century Latin America.

Written over a twenty-year span, the dense, lyrical prose poems of Julien Gracq’s Abounding Freedom illuminate the hidden lives of places as they take us into the workings of the imagination itself. Pairing his only book of poetry with the contemporaneous poetic prose piece “The Road,” the present collection opens a door onto the evolution of the celebrated French novelist’s work, from his early Surrealist experiments to the more grounded landscapes of his later style. Of Abounding Freedom Pen Translation Prize-winner Richard Sieburth has written: “Alice Yang has beautifully registered the groove and gyre of Gracq’s prose poetry as nobody before.”

Alice Yang holds a B.A. in Literature and Comparative Cultures from Yale, where she is currently a first-year Ph.D. student in the French department. Her translations have appeared in Asymptote, Two Lines, The Yale Review, and AGNI, among others. Abounding Freedom is her first book of translations.

Julien Gracq won the Prix Goncourt for his novel The Opposing Shore, but refused it out of disdain for the literary establishment. He is one of the few writers whose complete works were published during their lifetime by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, France’s most prestigious collection of classic authors.