Translating Poetry (It’s Not Easy): Matthias Goeritz and Mary Jo Bang

Join us for an evening celebrating the publication of Colonies of Paradise (Triquarterly, 2022) by Matthias Goeritz, Professor of Practice of Comparative Literature, and translated by Mary Jo Bang, Professor of English. Goeritz and Bang will discuss the innovative new translation of the original German work, which takes the reader on a tour of Paris, Chicago, Hamburg, and Moscow, exploring themes of childhood, travel, and the human experience. As practitioners of both poetry and the translation of poetry, our two authors will converse about the tricky but crucial work of literary translation.

Matthias Goeritz is a poet, translator, and novelist. He has written four poetry collections, Loops, Pools, Tools, and Spools; three novels, including Der kurze Traum des Jakob Voss (The Brief Dream of Jakob Voss) and Parker; and three novellas. He has received the Hamburg Literature Prize, the Mara Cassens Prize, the Robert Gernhardt Prize, and the William Gass Award.

Mary Jo Bang is the author of eight books of poetry—including Elegy: Poems, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award—and the translator of Dante’s Inferno, illustrated by Henrik Drescher, and Purgatorio. She has received a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship.

Free and open to all, registration required.