Getting Closer!

Translating Translating Montréal
or: What are those Montrealers Up To, and What’s It To Us in Calgary?
Conference and Readings on Innovative Translational Poetics

CALGARY, March 8 & 9 2007

Join us on March 8 & 9 as the University of Calgary, CJSW 90.9 FM and The New Gallery host Translating Translating Montréal, featuring discussion and performance by four writers from Montréal: Oana Avasilichioaei, Angela Carr, Robert Majzels, and Erín Moure.

Thursday, March 8
University of Calgary – Learning Commons Room, Biology 540A – 2:30pm-5pm - Free

1)Translating Translating Montréal: A Colloquium on the Theory and Practice of Poetic Translation, moderated by Calgary poet Jill Hartman

• Erín Moure – “Co-Translating ‘Nicole Brossard’: Three-Way Spectacle or Spectre de Trois?”
• Oana Avasilichioaei – “Towards a multiplied authorship and against a transparent I: in translational collaboration with the work of Paul Celan and Nichita Stanescu”
• Angela Carr: “Undercover/undiscover: Love and Eros between Languages”
• Robert Majzels: “Whittling: Translating Tang Dynasty Poets into 85 Letters”

University of Calgary – ST 147 – 7pm-8:30pm (by donation)

2)Mountroyal!: Poetry/Translation Performances by the four writers, hosted by dANDelion's kevin mcpherson eckhoff


Friday, March 9
The New Gallery – 516D - 9th Avenue SW – 7:00pm (by donation, door prizes)

3)Vacheville!: Performances by Oana Avasilichioaei, Angela Carr, Robert Majzels, and Erín Moure, hosted by filling Station's Natalie Walschots


The events are sponsored by the Faculty of Humanities, the English Department and the French, Italian and Spanish Department, The New Gallery, CJSW 90.9 FM, along with dANDelion and filling Station magazines.

Prizes and ephemera, poetry and peeps!


Oana Avasilichioaei is an emerging Montréal writer who works and teaches at Dawson College in Montréal, and runs the Atwater Poetry Project. She is currently collaborating with Erín Moure on a dialogic work involving translation from and to Romanian texts by Paul Celan and Nichita Stanescu. She has published two translations of Stanescu’s poetry (including Occupational Sickness, BuschekBooks, 2006) and a book of her own poems (Abandon, Wolsak & Wynn, 2005). She has published excerpts from a work in process, feria: a poempark, in a number of journals, and has given readings in Canada, USA and Slovenia.

Angela Carr is a writer and editor based in Montréal. Her translations of the concordance to the Roman de la Rose (Matrix, 2007) are excellent examples of the sort of innovative poetic translations the conference will examine. Her first book of poetry Ropewalk (Snare Books, Montréal) was published in 2006, and she is now working on a new text drawing from medieval and other sources, and from texts in multiple languages. Carr is one of the emerging writers immersed in Montréal’s multilingual and many-cultured scene who reads fluently in more than two languages, and whose work in English is influenced by linguistic and translational concerns.

Robert Majzels, currently on a limited term appointment as an associate professor in the University of Calgary’s English Department, is a novelist, poet, dramatist and past winner of the Governor General’s Award for Translation (for France Daigle’s Just Fine, 2000). His own work has been impacted by French, Hebrew (Apikoros Sleuth, Mercury, 2004) and more recently Chinese (“Books from the Burning Building,” NO Magazine, N.Y, 2006).

Erín Moure, a Governor General’s Award winning poet and author of 13 books, has been involved for several years now on developing innovative translation practices, with books like her acclaimed trans(e)lation of Fernando Pessoa in Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person. She is responsible for making available in English complex works by writers such as the Chilean poet Andrés Ajens, and the Galician poet Chus Pato (M-Tala, Nomados, Vancouver, 2003, and Charenton, Shearsman Books, UK, forthcoming 2007). Erín Moure and Robert Majzels have together translated three books by the renowned innovative Québec poet Nicole Brossard.