^Denis Ferhatović with his cats\, as per his request.
At a moment when ethnonationalist and hete ropatriarchal narratives erase the intertwined histories of global Jewish a nd 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 (E L&L)\, the Centre for European Studies (CES)\, and the Department of Centra l\, Eastern\, and Northern European Studies (CENES) for “Translatio n\, Multilingualism\, Poetics: Language Work in Muslim and Jewish Diasporas .”
This interd isciplinary roundtable brings together three Muslim and Jewish scholar-tran slator-poets — Denis Ferhatović\, Rahat Kurd\, and Anna Elena Torres — to discuss the cross-curren ts 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-c entury Ottoman Turkish and twentieth-century Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) poetry\ , as well as his original Bosnian-language poetry\, in the context of excav ating a fuller and queerer historical multilingualism in Bosnia\, beyond mo dern South Slavo-centric heteronationalisms. Rahat Kurd\, award-winning Vancouver poet\, will share poems and research from her in-pr ogress poetry collection\, tentatively titled THE BOOK OF Z\, on the Biblic al/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 Literatu re\, on Yiddish anarchist aesthetics from the nineteenth-century Russi a through the modernist avant-gardes of Warsaw\, Chicago\, and London to co ntemporary antifascist composers. Rather than focusing on narratives of ass imilation\, Torres intervenes in earlier models of Jewish literature by cen tering refugee critiques of the border that cultivated stateless imaginatio ns.
Whether you choose to join us in-person in Buchanan Tower 323 or virtually via Zoom\, please register for the event using this lin k. We look forward to sharing space with you.
“Translation\, Multilingualism\, Poetics: Language Work in Muslim and Jewish Diasporas” is the inaugural event in the 2024-25 EL&L Visiting Speaker Series and the in augural 2024-25 CENES Ziegler Lecture. It i s presented by the Muslim-Jewish Cultures in Europe Project based at UBC. T his event is also co-sponsored by the UBC School of Creative Writing.< /p>
^Denis Ferhatović with his cats\, as per his request.
Denis Ferhatović (he/him) (b. 1980) is a Bosnian-American scholar and writer\, workin g and playing with English\, French\, Turkish\, Indonesian\, South Slavic m icrolanguages\, and medieval Germanic and Romance languages. His interests include food\, graphic novels\, histories of Englishes\, immigrant writing\ , postcolonial and queer theories\, and translation. Denis’s essays\, poems \, reviews\, translations\, and co-translations have been published in Rumba under Fire\, Index on Censorship\, The Riddle Ages< /em>\, Iberian Connections\, Turkoslavia\, Trinity Jo urnal of Literary Translation (JoLT)\, DoubleSpeak\, Asym ptote\, and Exchanges. His scholarly work appears in various journals and essay collections\, most recently in Exemplaria and InterA lia: A Journal of Queer Studies. Denis’s monograph Borrowed Object s and the Art of Poetry: Spolia in Old English Verse (Manchester Unive rsity Press\, 2019) came out in paperback this spring.
Ferhatović will combine scholarship and personal r eminiscences to illuminate the role Judeo-Spanish (or Ladino) might have in excavating a multilingual and queer Balkan past which counters South Slavi c hetero-nationalist narratives and Western hegemonic construction of the B alkans as a site of unchanging savagery.
He will begin by looking at two individual words (haver “friend” and arrajlanearse / razrahatlenisati s e\, “to reach the point of complete relaxation”) and a rhymed saying (“Ador na un palíko se azerá un ermozíko”/ “Uredi klip\, biće lip\,” “Dress up a [ little] stick and it will be a [little] beauty”) that have equivalents both in Judeo-Spanish and Bosnian. What common ideas of friendship\, relaxation \, and personal aesthetics do they embody?
Then\, he will consider th e Judeo-Spanish folk lyric\, “Sekretos kero deskuvrir\,” “I want to reveal secrets” (that figures prominently in Aleksandar Hemon’s latest novel\, The World and All That It Holds [2023])\, alongside the Macedonian fo lk lyric\, “По друм одав\, мајче\, по друм шетав\,” “I walked along the roa d\, Ma\, I strolled along the road.” They will help him think about the que er potential of shared Balkan cultural tradition of songs that employ the s trategy of gender-ambiguous language. He will argue that\, as texts and per formances\, both lyrics present possibilities not only for queer readings b ut also for a less restrictive understanding of gender relations in heteroe rotic entanglements.
Rahat Kurd (she/her)\, a poet and cultural critic based in Vancouver\, is currently at work on T he Book of Z\, her second book of poetry. Kurd is a close reader who d raws on multilingual poetics and the ghazal tradition in Urdu and Persian l iterature. Her most recent essay\, “Elegiac Moods: Letters to Agha Shahid A li” was published in river in an ocean: essays on translation (Ed. Nuzhat Abbas\, trace press: Toronto\, 2023). Her book The City That Is Leaving Forever: Kashmiri Letters (Talonbooks 2021)\, is a hybrid of correspondence and poetry exchanged between Vancouver and Kashmir over a fi ve-year period with poet Sumayya Syed. Cosmophilia (Talonbooks 201 5) was her first book of poems.
Anna Elena Torres (she/her) is an ass istant professor at the University of Chicago in the departments of Compara tive Literature and Race\, Diaspora\, and Indigeneity. Torres is the author of Horizons Blossom\, Borders Vanish: Anarchism and Yiddish Literature (Yale University Press) and co-editor of With Freedom in Our Ears : Histories of Jewish Anarchism (University of Illinois Press).
Torres examines Yiddish anarchist ae sthetics from the nineteenth-century Russian proletarian immigrant poets th rough the modernist avant-gardes of Warsaw\, Chicago\, and London to contem porary antifascist composers. She traces Jewish anarchist strategies for ne gotiating surveillance\, censorship\, detention\, and deportation\, reveali ng the connection between Yiddish modernism and struggles for free speech\, women’s bodily autonomy\, and the transnational circulation of avant-garde literature. Rather than focusing on narratives of assimilation\, Torres in tervenes in earlier models of Jewish literature by centering refugee critiq ue of the border. Jewish deportees\, immigrants\, and refugees opposed citi zenship as the primary guarantor of human rights. Instead\, they cultivated stateless imaginations\, elaborated through literature.
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