Poets, meet translators
Several noted Spanish-language poets are visiting Harvard this week in a unique event that pairs the poets and their works with top translators in the field. Argentinian poets Washington Cucurto and Tamara Kamenszain and Chilean poet Malú Urriola read their works in the original Spanish Tuesday evening in the kickoff event of “Transversal: A Latin American Poetry Lab,” sponsored by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, the Woodberry Poetry Room, and the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. Poet Forrest Gander, a professor at Brown University and a Pulitzer Prize finalist, read English translations of Cucurto’s frenetic, slang-laced works culled from the streets of Buenos Aires. Anna Deeny, a lecturer on history and literature and noted translator of Raúl Zurita, read Urriola’s downbeat, introspective works. And Laura Healy, managing editor of the Harvard Review and translator of three collections of Roberto Bolaño’s poetry, also conjured the livelihood of Buenos Aires...