Rhome Creative Workshops

"Lesley Saunders with grandson" (top left)

"Margarida Vale de Gato" photo by Nuka Gambashidze (bottom right)

Creative Writing Workshop with Margarida Vale de Gato

No Translator is an I-Land?

21st June, 10h30-12h30 (Room B112.C)

Summary

This workshop has a twofold aim: i) to investigate autobiographical arcs in the practice of translation; ii) to explore ways of using translation, hetero- and bilinguism in poetry writing, as well as English as a mediated and appropriated medium. I will share examples from a couple of translator-poets and from my own work, namely from Die nicht reklamierten Reste. Lyrisches Handbuch des Übersetzens, a small “lyrical handbook of translation” I have co-written with my translator, Odile Kennel (2021)

I will also give theoretical background about inscriptions of the self in and through translation, and defer to Anglo-Modernism and its transatlantic streak as the breeding period of literature as art in (self-)translation. The workshop is interspersed with small exercises for us to explore how translation can be a tool not only for introspection but for shaping distanced poetic voices.

Bionote

Margarida Vale de Gato translates, writes, teaches and researches. She is an Assistant Professor in the areas of Translation and US Literature in Universidade de Lisboa, School of Arts and Humanities, where she coordinates the major and minor in American Studies. As a literary translator, she has produced versions of French and English canonical texts into Portuguese (Sarraute, Michaux, Carroll, Yeats, Twain, Kerouac, Munro).

Her most relevant academic publications in the area of Literary Translation consist of an article in META on her translation of Lolita, the chapter “Translation and Multilingual/Creative Writing” for The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Education in 2020, and the essay “Fernando Pessoa, Poet-Translator ‘Overwriting’ Poe and Whitman,” for The Translator in 2021.

She has published the poetry collections Lançamento (Douda Correria, 2016), Atirar para o Torto. and Mulher ao Mar (Mariposa Azual, 2010),  with the enlarged editions Mulher ao Mar Retorna (2013) and Mulher ao Mar e Grinalda (2018).

ng professor at UCL Institute of Education, and an honorary research fellow at Oxford University Department of Education.

Creative Writing Workshop with Lesley Saunders

As if the earth itself is unstable: imaginaries of home in 2023

21st June, 15h-17h (Room B112.B)

Due to unforseen circumstances, Lesley Saunders will join us via zoom.

Summary

The conference will promote reflection on ‘the experience of home, the longing for home and the challenges of belonging in a world faced with (in)voluntary migration and exile’ Accordingly, this workshop will give participants space for that reflection and time for composing creative responses arising from their own experiences of, and their imaginative engagement with, those great themes. The ideas are as old as human history and have found expression in some of the world’s most profound and glorious literature, though they have a peculiar poignancy in our own times when it is ‘as if the earth itself is unstable’ – I owe this notion to my husband who has Alzheimer’s disease, so the heart-stopping estrangement we experience may be internal and personal as much as external and collective. What do we mean by ‘home’ and where is it to be found?

Keywords

Dislocation; Nostos; ‘Home’;  Estrangement; Imagination

Bionote

Lesley Saunders’ most recent poetry collections are This Thing of Blood & Love (Two Rivers Press, 2022) and, with Rebecca Swainston, Days of Wonder (Hippocrates Press, 2021), a record of the first year of the Covid pandemic. Her translations – including the poem that won the 2016 Stephen Spender award – of Portuguese poet Maria Teresa Horta were published as Point of Honour (Two Rivers Press, 2019). With poet Philip Gross she co-authored A Part of the Main (Mulfran Press 2018), a response to the UK’s exit from the European Union. Lesley is a visiting professor at UCL Institute of Education, and an honorary research fellow at Oxford University Department of Education.