Tuesday, October 18th
9:30-10:30 am, Mather House 100

Brian James Baer

“Competing Canons: Translating Latin American Literature in the Cold War”

Brian James Baer is Professor of Russian and Translation Studies at Kent State University. He is founding editor of the journal Translation and Interpreting Studies and co-editor of the book series Literatures, Cultures, Translation (Bloomsbury) and Translation Studies in Translation (Routledge). His publications include the monographs Other Russias, Translation and the Making of Modern Russian Literature, and Queer Theory and Translation Studies, as well as the collected volumes Beyond the Ivory Tower: Re-thinking Translation Pedagogy, with Geoffrey Koby, Contexts, Subtexts and Pretexts: Literary Translation in Eastern Europe and Russia, Researching Translation and Interpreting, with Claudia Angelelli, Translation in Russian Contexts, with Susanna Witt, and Queering Translation, Translating the Queer, with Klaus Kaindl. His most recent translations include Culture, Memory and History: Essays in Cultural Semiotics, by Juri Lotman, Introduction to Translation Theory, by Andrei Fedorov, and Red Crosses by Sasha Filipenko. He is a member of the advisory board of the Mona Baker Centre for Translation Studies, in Shanghai, China, and of the Nida Center for Advanced Research on Translation, in Rimini, Italy. He is the current president of the American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association.

Wednesday, October 19th
2:45-3:45 pm, Mather House 100

Timothy Pogačar

“The Writer as Character: Literary Translations in the Soviet Union, 1950s–1960s”

Timothy Pogačar received a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of Kansas and undergraduate degrees in Russian and Spanish from Georgetown University. He has translated widely from Russian and Slovene, completing eight Slovene-English book-length translations since 2013, the most recent of which is Ivan Tavčar’s Visoko Chronicle. Current research is on fiction in émigré newspapers and sound preferences for characters’ names. Pogačar has edited the journal Slovene Studies since 1986. At Bowling Green SU, he teaches all levels of Russian language and courses on Russian culture, post-communist Russia, and Eastern Europe.

Thursday, October 20th
12:00-1:00 pm, Mather House 100

Pavel Grushko

“Traducir poesía: ¿es solo contar sin cantar?”/ “Translating Poetry: Telling without Reciting?”

Pavel Moiseevich Grushko (born in 1931 in Odessa, Ukraine) is a Russian poet, playwright, and translator of poetry and prose from Spain, Latin America, Portugal, England, and the United States. He studied at the Moscow State Linguistic University, and is a member of the Moscow Writers Union and founder and vice-president of the Russian Association of Hispano-American History and Philology Scholars. He was also the director of the creative workshops at the Gorky Literary Institute and Lomonosov Moscow University.

Grushko was the senior translator for the iconic 1964 Soviet-Cuban film I am Cuba, directed by Mikhail Kalatosov, script by Evgueni Evtushenko and Enrique Pineda Barnet, and camera by Serguei Urusevky.

He is the author of four collections of poetry: The Abandoned Garden (1999), Hug a Rabbit (2003), Between Me and Reality (2007) and Freedom of Speech (2011). Translated into Spanish, his collections have been published in Spain, Mexico, and Peru. For his poetry, he was awarded a Gold Medal at the Alberico Sala poetry contest in Besana-Brianza, Italy (1994).

He is also the author of plays and librettos collected in the anthology Theater in Verse (Moscow. AST-Astrel. 2008). One of them – The Rise and Death of Joaquin Murieta (based on the dramatic cantata by Pablo Neruda), withstood about 1200 performances at the Moscow Lenkom Theater, and became a film and audio album. Mr. Grushko’s adaptation of poetry to theater productions presents a unique literary experience.

Pavel M. Grushko has translated from Spanish to Russian works of Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Luis de Gongora, Francisco de Quevedo, Federico Garcia Lorca, Jose Martí, Nicolás Guillén, Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Antonio Machado, Miguel Hernández, Leopoldo Lugones, Octavio Paz, José Lezama Lima, among many others. Mr. Gruhsko’s interpretations, in addition to his original work, include the plays of Mikhail Bulgakov, Thomas Mann, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Sholom Aleikhem, and Maxim Gorky.

He has also translated from English to Russian the works of D. Donn, D. Thomas, Oden, Sandberg, Pen Worren, Wilbur, the poets of the Beatnik period, and others.

He is the author of the Trans\Forms project (the theory and practice of literary translation as a method of transformation in different genres of art).

Since 2001, he has lived primarily in Boston (USA).