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Join us for a discussion of literary translation practice, featuring poet/translators TAIJE SILVERMAN and MARCI VOGEL, and SARAH STICKNEY. 

Taije Silverman, Sarah Stickney, and Marci Vogel will discuss collaboration, linguistic impossibilities, and other questions fundamental to translation. Penn students will also participate in the conversation, and audience members will be invited to create their own translation-poems at the end of the talk.

SARAH STICKNEY received her MFA from the University of New Hampshire. She is a former Fulbright Grantee for the translation of Italian/Albanian poet Gëzim Hajdari. Her co-translations of Elisa Biagini's selected poems, The Guest in the Wood, received the Best Translated Book Award for poetry in 2014. Her poems and translations have appeared both in the U.S. and abroad in publications such as La Questione Romantica, Rhino, The Portland Review, Drunken Boat, Mudlark, The Notre Dame Review, Structo and others. The Guest in the Wood (Chelsea Editions: New York, 2013), her co-translations of Elisa Biagini’s selected poems, was chosen by the University of Rochester in 2014 for Best Translated Book of Poetry. She lives in Annapolis, MD, where she teaches at St. John's College.

TAIJE SILVERMAN's debut book, Houses are Fields, was published in 2009 by LSU Press, and her newer poetry has been in The Best American Poetry, the Harvard Review, AGNI, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2016 Anne Halley Prize from the Massachusetts Review for Best Poem, the 2010-11 W.K. Rose Fellowship from Vassar College, the 2005-2007 Emory University Poetry Fellowship (selected by Natasha Trethewey), and several residencies from The MacDowell Colony. In 2010-11, she taught poetry and translation at the University of Bologna on a Fulbright Fellowship. She also serves on the editorial board of Alice James Books. Silverman's co-translations of early twentieth century Italian poet Giovanni Pascoli have appeared or are forthcoming in The Nation, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, AGNI, and many other journals. Houses are Fieldsappeared in Italian translation in 2013 (LE CASE SONO CAMPI, trans. Giorgia Pordenoni, Oedipus Edizioni).

MARCI VOGEL is the author of At the Border of Wilshire & Nobody, winner of the 2015 Howling Bird Press Poetry Prize. A native of Los Angeles, Vogel is currently a Provost’s Fellow in the Ph.D. program in creative writing and literature at the University of Southern California. Her poetry, translations, and essays have appeared in a number of publications, including Field, Plume, Jacket2, Zyzzyva, Puerto Del Sol, Poet Lore, Colorado Review, and Seneca Review. Awarded a 2014 Willis Barnstone Translation Prize, Vogel’s writing has also earned recognition from the Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the AWP Intro Journals Project, and the James Jones Literary Society. Vogel recently organized a public reading at the Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook as part of a new program to bring poetry to California State Parks. Vogel served as 2013-2014 poetry editor of Gold Line Press and has taught writing and literature in the honors program at USC and at Santa Monica College. She is currently at work on a new collection of poems, several translation projects, and a hybrid manuscript based on the life and work of medieval Francophone poet, Christine de Pizan. Before entering USC in the fall of 2012, Vogel taught for 22 years at a Los Angeles nonprofit elementary school founded to include students with hearing loss.