Currently & Emotion Performances and Panel Discussion

This two-part event is the second to take place as part of Sophie Collins’ Associate Poet residency, and foregrounds the forthcoming publication of translation anthology Currently & Emotion (Test Centre, 2016), edited by Collins. The event consists of a series of performances by practitioners whose work and/or writing on translation is vital and necessarily politically charged. The second part of this event involves a panel discussion that focuses on the current state of poetry translation, its attendant issues of appropriation and role in contemporary culture.

Participants include Caroline Bergvall, Sophie Collins, Linh Dinh and Deborah Smith.

Caroline Bergvall is a London-based writer and artist, working across artforms, media and languages. She is a strong proponent of writing methods and verbal performances that emerge from multilingual, audiovisual and contextual concerns. Her projects include poetic works, audio pieces, drawings, installations and live performances, often in collaboration. Her most recent performance Drift (2012-14) for live voice, percussion (Ingar Zach) and electronic text (Thomas Köppel) combined harrowing contemporary sea migrancy reports with a rewriting of the Anglo-saxon Seafarer. It was awarded a Judith E. Wilson Fellowship in Poetry and Drama (Cambridge) and opened Poetry International 2014 at the Southbank Centre. Other publications include Meddle English (2011) and FIG (2005) as well as a DVD of installations Ghost Pieces (2010). She presents her works internationally at institutions including Tate Modern (London), Khoj Centre (New Delhi), Fondation Vuitton (Paris), Mamco Museum (Geneva), MCA Denver, Samtidsmuseet (Oslo), MOMA (NY) and Whitechapel Gallery (London), where she was writer-in-residence in 2014.

Sophie Collins is co-editor of online journal tender, a quarterly publication promoting work by female-identified writers and artists. Her poems have appeared in magazines and anthologies in the UK, the US, Spain, Germany and China, including The White Review, Poetry and Poetic Series (Sternberg Press). She received an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 2014. She is now completing a PhD in Poetry and Translation at Queen's University Belfast and editing Currently & Emotion, an anthology of translations to be published by Test Centre in early 2016. Her first collection of poems will be published by Penguin in 2017.

Linh Dinh is a Vietnam-born American author of two books of stories, five of poems and a novel. He's been widely anthologized, including in Great American Prose Poems from Poe to the Present, Postmodern American Poetry: a Norton Anthology (vol. 2) and three editions of Best American Poetry. He's also the editor of Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam and The Deluge: New Vietnamese Poetry. He has also published widely in Vietnamese and has translated many world authors into the language. His newest book, Postcards from the End of America, is due out in January of 2016.

Deborah Smith is a literary translator working from Korean into English. Her publications include two novels by Han Kang, The Vegetarian and Human Acts (both Portobello Books UK, Crown US), and two by Bae Suah, The Essayist's Desk (forthcoming in the US from Open Letter) and The Low Hills of Seoul. Deborah recently founded Tilted Axis Press, a not-for-profit press focusing on highly literary contemporary fiction; mainly by women, mainly in translation. Tilted Axis' first titles, which will be released from 2016, include a darkly erotic Bengali novella, an obliquely allegorical take on South Korea's social minorities, and a feminist, environmentalist narrative poem from Indonesia, published as a 'sight-impaired-accessible' art book. These will be followed up by translations from Thai, Uzbek, and Japanese.