Dangerous Words—Unexpected Destinations: Five Poets Read Their Work and Translations
March 26, 2015
WHEN: April 12, 2015 @ 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm
WHERE: Salem Athenaeum
337 Essex Street, Salem, MA 01970 USA
COST: Free
CONTACT: Kristine Doll
PROGRAMS’ WRITERS
Maria Bennett, Kristine Doll, Shreejana Sharma, Yuyutsu Sharma, and Bill Wolak will offer a Spring inventory of risky declamations on the themes of intimacy, loss, alienation, perishability, travel, and unexpected pleasures. Each of the poets will offer temptations, celebrations, and insights. In addition, these five poets will explore various destinations in the world of “the other” through their translations from around the globe, including brief stopovers in Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Persian, and Nepalese.
The afternoon will feature the distinguished Indian/Nepali poet Yuyutsu Sharma, who is currently on a tour of North and South America. Having just returned from Nicaragua, where he read his poetry in the streets of Managua with Ernesto Cardenal to an audience of thirty thousand people, Mr. Sharma will offer poems that evoke both the daunting primordial landscape of the Himalayas and the contemporary space cake of Amsterdam.
Maria Bennett has published a book of poetry entitled Because You Love. Her poetry has appeared in California Quarterly, Timber Creek Review, Gargoyle, Southern California Review, River Poets Journal, Red Rock Review, Caveat Lector, The Mochila Review, Barbaric Yawp, Eclipse, Common Ground Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, The Pinch, Main Street Rag, Third Wednesday, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Illuminations, andPsychic Meatloaf. Recently she has published a translation of the works of the Italian poet Annelisa Addolorato with Bill Wolak entitled My Voice Seeks You: The Selected Poetry of Annelisa Addolorato, Cross-Cultural Communications, 2013. Ms. Bennett’s articles and reviews have appeared in The Daily News, Utne Reader, Epicurean, and other newspapers and magazines. Her critical work The Unfractioned Idiom: Hart Crane and Modernism was published by Peter Lang Press in 1987.
Kristine Doll is the author of the poetry collection Speak to Me Again (Feral Press, 2014). “My Friends” from this book was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in Poetry. She is also a translator of Catalan poetry, including her translations into English of Joan Alcover’sElegies (Cross-Cultural Communications, 2004) and the poetry of the Catalan writer, August Bover. She is currently guest editor of The Seventh Quarry’s special edition of the translation into English of six of Catalonia’s contemporary poets. Doll’s translations and her own poetry have been published internationally in such venues as The Seventh Quarry, Cross-Cultural Communications Art & Poetry Series Broadsides, The Paterson Literary Review, Immagine & Poesia, Gargoyle and Voices Israel. She is Professor of World Languages and Cultures at Salem State University, Salem MA.
Shreejana Sharma is an emerging Nepali voice, who was born and raised in Kathmandu. She is particularly interested in Nepalese folk lore and legends. Widely travelled, she has conducted Nepali poetry translation workshops with Yuyutsu Sharma at Heidelberg University and has been instrumental in preserving the treasure of Nepali poetry in Nepalese circles. Currently she lives in Kathmandu, heads the White Lotus Book Shop, and is working on a manuscript of poems, entitled Papaji & Other Poems soon to be published in New Delhi.
Yuyutsu Sharma is the recipient of fellowships and grants from The Rockefeller Foundation, Ireland Literature Exchange, Trubar Foundation, Slovenia, The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature and The Foundation for the Production and Translation of Dutch Literature. He is a distinguished Indian/Nepali poet and translator. He has published nine poetry collections including, Nine New York Poems: A Prelude to A Blizzard in My Bones, 2014, Milarepa’s Bones, 33 New Poems, Nirala, 2012. Yuyutsu’s own work has been translated into German, French, Italian, Slovenian, Hebrew, Spanish and Dutch. Half the year, he travels all over the world to read from his works and conduct creative writing workshops at various universities in North America and Europe, and the other half he goes trekking in the Himalayas when he returns back home to Nepal. Currently, he is in New York as a Visiting Poet at New York University.
Bill Wolak is a poet who lives in New Jersey and teaches Creative Writing at William Paterson University. He has just published his thirteenth collection of poetry entitled Love Opens the Hands: New and Selected Love Poems with Nirala Press. His poetry has appeared in over a hundred magazines. His most recent translation with Mahmood Karimi-Hakak, Love Me More Than the Others: Selected Poetry of Iraj Mirza, was published by Cross-Cultural Communications in 2014. He was selected to be a featured poet at festivals in India four times: at the 2011 Kritya International Poetry Festival in Nagpur, at the 2013 Hyderabad Literary Festival, at the Tarjuma 2013: Festival of Translators in Ahmedabad, and most recently at the 2014 Hyderabad Literary Festival.
