Cullman Center Institute for Teachers: Poetry as Translation: A Creative Writing Workshop with Vivek Narayanan

Poetry as Translation: A Creative Writing Workshop with Vivek Narayanan                                             

This workshop will use “translation” as inspiration for writing our own poems. We’ll think about the space between languages and consider the translated poem not as an “exact copy” of the original, but as a refraction, a riff. We’ll examine fascinating and exciting experiments with poetry and translation, reading poems by Jack Spicer, Alice Oswald, Latasha Nevada Diggs, Christian Hawkey and others. Participants will be given the opportunity to experiment by writing multilingual texts, working with languages they don’t necessarily know. Knowledge of other languages is not required.

Vivek Narayanan’s books of poems include Universal Beach and Life and Times of Mr S. He is the co-editor of Almost Island, an Indian literary journal and publishing house. He was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute in 2013-14. At the Cullman Center, Narayanan is working on a book of poems that “writes through” the Ramayana of Valmiki (the first Sanskrit epic poem) in ways that try at once to incorporate and reinvent what we currently think of as translation practice.

This seminar is not open to the public. It is only for teachers who have applied and been accepted into the class.