&NOW 2018

In this panel we will discuss translation's transgressive circulation. Instead of focusing on the old binary of free-vs-faithful translation, we will talk about what happens when we translate: What happens to the poem, the poet, the translator and the various contexts that the translation sets in motion. Rather than fearing or neutralizing the volatility and uncertainty of translation, we'll celebrate translation's capacity for resisting assimilation and altering US literary culture's conception of itself, revealing it to be contradictory, various, and plural. Translation reveals a US poetry made of myriad of movements, permutations and contact zones, a poetry of queer and contested borders. Translation alters the power dynamics of publishing, scholarship and readership and reveals the imperial language of English itself to be strange, corrupted, mutant and excessive.