At a moment when ethnonationalist and heteropatriarchal narratives erase the intertwined histories of global Jewish and Muslim communities and portray us as inherently antagonistic, diasporic scholars and artists connect through resonant forms and questions to find pleasure in differences.
On September 19, 2024 at 3:30 pm PT, please join the Department of English Language & Literatures (EL&L), the Centre for European Studies (CES), and the Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies (CENES) for “Translation, Multilingualism, Poetics: Language Work in Muslim and Jewish Diasporas.”
This interdisciplinary roundtable brings together three Muslim and Jewish scholar-translator-poets — Denis Ferhatović, Rahat Kurd, and Anna Elena Torres — to discuss the cross-currents of their work and the generativity of translation and multilingualism in Jewish and Muslim cultural work, with particular attention to dissension from state-sponsored narratives.
Denis Ferhatović (Connecticut College) will discuss his new translations of sixteenth-century Ottoman Turkish and twentieth-century Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) poetry, as well as his original Bosnian-language poetry, in the context of excavating a fuller and queerer historical multilingualism in Bosnia, beyond modern South Slavo-centric heteronationalisms. Rahat Kurd, award-winning Vancouver poet, will share poems and research from her in-progress poetry collection, tentatively titled THE BOOK OF Z, on the Biblical/Quranic figure of Potiphar’s wife, known in multiple sources of Persian and Urdu poetry, and Persian/Mughal art, as Zulaikha. Anna Elena Torres (University of Chicago) will discuss material from her new book Horizons Blossom, Borders Vanish: Anarchism and Yiddish Literature, on Yiddish anarchist aesthetics from the nineteenth-century Russia through the modernist avant-gardes of Warsaw, Chicago, and London to contemporary antifascist composers. Rather than focusing on narratives of assimilation, Torres intervenes in earlier models of Jewish literature by centering refugee critiques of the border that cultivated stateless imaginations.
Whether you choose to join us in-person in Buchanan Tower 323 or virtually via Zoom, please register for the event using the link below. We look forward to sharing space with you.