Adam Zagajewski and Translation Roundtables at the University of Michigan

The Polish poet Adam Zagajewski will be reading at the University of Michigan on December 4th and participating in a roundtable discussion on translation the following day, Friday, December 5th. The full schedule for the translation roundtables is below and more information about the reading can be found here.

THE ETHICS OF TRANSLATION
Two Roundtable Discussions, co-sponsored by the Department of Comparative Literature, the MFA Program in Creative Writing, the Modern Greek Program, and the Center for Russian and Eastern European Studies.

Friday, 5 December 2008
3222 Angell Hall
University of Michigan

10:30-12:30: WHY TRANSLATE?
Moderator:
Yopie Prins (English/Comparative Literature)
Roundtable:
Christi Merrill (Asian Languages/Comparative Literature)
Joshua Miller (English Literature)
Alina Clej (Romance Languages/Comparative Literature)
Kader Konuk (German/Comparative Literature)
Vassilis Lambropoulos (Classical Studies/Comparative Literature)

1:30-3:30: IS TRANSLATION POSSIBLE?
Moderator:
Benjamin Paloff (Society of Fellows, Slavic/Comparative Literature)
Roundtable:
Adam Zagajewski (MFA Visiting Poet)
Tatjana Aleksic (Slavic/Comparative Literature)
David Caron (Romance Languages/Women's Studies)
Khaled Mattawa (English Literature/Creative Writing)
Keith Taylor (English Literature /Creative Writing)

Adam Zagajewski on Milosz

In the Threepenny Review Adam Zagajewski remembers Czeslaw Milosz:

One of the last humans who spoke to him in his hours of agony was an uneducated woman who took care of his small household, a wonderful person with a great heart. I like to think of it: in the vast polyphony of the almost hundred years of his dramatic existence, the ultimate sound he heard was an unschooled voice of goodness. Perhaps in this soothing voice he found something like an arch between his early idyllic childhood in the Lithuanian countryside and his closing moments; and in between there remained, bracketed out for once, the rage of modern history, the loneliness of his long exile, the violence of his struggles, of his thought, his imagination, his rebellions.