DISINTEGRATING CANTONS (IN CALGARY)
a lecture/reading at the University of Calgary, Thursday, November 21, 2013: DISINTEGRATING CANTONS IN TRANSLATION: THE SHAPE OF A TRANSNATIONAL LANGUAGE
Modernist fantasies of communication that might absorb the fragmented tongues of Babel led to transformations of the shape, sound, and materiality of poetry over the course of the twentieth century. While poetry has been branded as that which is lost in translation, Scappettone will discuss strategies of translation and more audacious forms of poetic transmutation for trafficking in the fact that language’s origins are the result of collisions, jealousies, overhearings, mistranslations—so as to “find” something in the process of creating new solutions for traversal without sacrificing that feeling of loss that keeps us curious.
Dr. Jennifer Scappettone is an American poet and translator of contemporary Italian poetry into English. She is the author of the poetry collection From Dame Quickly (Litmus Press, 2009) and the editor and translator of Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli (University of Chicago Press, 2012), which was awarded the biennial Raiziss/De Palchi Book Prize by the Academy of American Poets. Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice, her study of the outmoded city as a crucible for twentieth-century experiments across literature, politics, the visual arts, and urbanism, is forthcoming in spring 2014 from Columbia University Press. Dr. Scappettone was the 2010-11 Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Rome Prize Fellow, and is currently Associate Professor at the University of Chicago.
This free event will take place in the Judith Sloman Reading Room (Social Sciences 1114) Everyone is welcome.
