This weekend I was in Minneapolis for the 40th annual American Literary Translators Association conference. It was a blast; I met dozens of brilliant editors and translators, reunited with friends made this May at the Biennial Graduate Student Translation Conference held at UT Dallas, and absorbed so many interesting perspectives on what it is to be a translator and an editor who works with translations.
Aside from hearing a lot of great work in translation and having many thoughts provoked by the weekend’s fantastic panelists, I got to volunteer a few hours at the conference bookfair, and—most exciting—I was honored to read my translations of Nadia Escalante Andrade at Saturday’s Exchanges contributor reading. I read four poems, two of which were published by Exchanges in their spring 2017 issue. As I walked out of the reading, I checked my phone to see a heartwarming Facebook post from Nadia, which I’ll translate here:
¿Saben qué es más bonito que leer los poemas propios en lecturas públicas? Que otrxs lean tus poemas con otra voz y en otro idioma ante seres que no te miran pero sí te ven, y no te escuchan, pero sí reconocen tu voz.
[You know what’s more beautiful than reading your own poems at a public reading? Having someone else read your poems in another voice and another language, before beings who do not look at you but do see you, and that don’t hear you but do recognize your voice.]
This is such a lovely description of what translation does for literature, and I’m happy to have spent a weekend with the people who dedicate themselves to recognizing the voices of the world.