Hearing the Drawing: Ekphrastic Poetry and Translation, A Reading and Conversation
Thursday 14 November 2019, 5:15pm
Seminar Room 10, St Anne's College, Oxford
Is ekphrasis a kind of translation? What kind of ekphrasis? Which sort of translation? What does a given writer’s approach to one tell us about the other? And why should we care? American poet and translator Peter Cole will talk about the complex dynamics at play behind these and related questions, as he reads from his recent work that takes up this subject directly.
Peter Cole is the author of five books of poems—most recently Hymns & Qualms: New and Selected Poems and Translations (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017)—and numerous volumes of translation from Hebrew and Arabic, medieval and modern. His many honors include an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Jewish National Book Award, PEN and TLS Prizes in Translation, and a MacArthur Fellowship. He divides his time between Jerusalem and New Haven, where he teaches at Yale each spring.