Reminder: Salon this Sunday @ 12 EST!
Poet Gail Newman and Translator, Poet, and Scholar Seth Michelson
I’m very excited to host poet Gail Newman and translator, poet, and scholar Seth Michelson this Sunday June 8th at 12 EST, and I hope you will join us!
Newman’s haunting poems re-imagining her mother’s experience in the Holocaust moved me deeply, and I felt she was doing a translation of sorts—translating what her mother saw, heard, and miraculously lived through into poetry in English. The poems feel immediate, and the descriptions seem close-by. You can read the newsletter about Newman’s poems here: Poems of a Home That Is No Longer Home
Poet Gail Newman, author of Blood Memory.
Seth Michelson’s incredible translations of the award-winning and much-admired Argentine poet and essayist Tamara Kamenszain have been the subjects of the past two newsletters. Kamenszain, like many of us, feels caught between worlds.
You can see a few of the poems in the original Spanish as well as the English translations, and you can read about how Kamenszain understands her own work as moving between Spanish, Hebrew, Yiddish, and the various other languages spoken by her ancestors. I wrote about the poems here in From Argentina and about the incredible essay here in The Ghetto of My Tongue.
As always, the salon will focus on four poems from each writer. There will be a reading and a discussion on how the poems were made. Questions are encouraged!
Translator Seth Michelson (Wikipedia)
Seth Michelson is an award-winning poet, translator, and professor.
He has published nineteen collections of original poetry, poetry in translation, and an anthology, as well as numerous essays, articles, and book chapters on poetry. He also founded and and directs the Center for Poetic Research (https://www.wlu.edu/center-for-poetic-research).
He has recently been featured at poetry festivals in Argentina, Germany, India, Kenya, Mexico, Slovenia, and Uruguay. His awards include an NEA Fellowship and an Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award. He was also named Professor of the Year for his teaching in New York, and he was a finalist for the State Council of Higher Education of Virginia’s Outstanding Faculty Award.