Literature in translation today touches on wide-ranging and often challenging themes: whether it’s watching the last of a northern Canadian winter during a COVID-19 quarantine, bearing witness to oppression in Hong Kong or a critique of gender roles in post-war Denmark through the eyes of a young girl, translation offers the chance for important work to reach new audiences.

All of these ideas and more—including contemporary Arabic and Japanese poetry—are brought to life by University of Alberta scholars with the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies in this YouTube video.

In celebration of World Translation Day and the university’s annual St. Jerome’s Day translation conference and readings, five translators share their work in partnership with the Literary Translators Association of Canada.

Hosted by Anne Malena, University of Alberta professor and editor of TransCulturAl: A Journal of Translation and Cultural Studies, the event is a virtual version of the annual St. Jerome’s Day conference—something Malena has been organizing for 18 years. The event celebrates translation, translators and translation scholars. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the in-person event was postponed until 2021, and is planned for September of next year with a theme of ‘Translation and Queer’.

This year, though, the community has come together to celebrate the festival virtually.

One translator, Sofía Monzón, reads her own poem in Spanish and her English translation: “Proceso de balcón en cuarentena”/”Quarantine Balcony in the Midst”. A PhD candidate in transnational and comparative literatures, her first collection of poetry, Alas (Wings in English) was published in 2019.

Another, Marina Allemano, reads a translation of the poem “The Ashtray” (Askebægeret in Danish) from the poetry collection Odd Couples (Umage par, 1983) by Dorrit Willumsen. Allemano holds a PHd in comparative literature and has taught Scandinavian studies at the University of Alberta.

Other featured translators and their work include:
– Matthew Danzinger, Master’s student in East Asian studies
o Translation of “Sigh” by Kawaji Ryūkō (川路柳虹 in Japanese)
– Wangtaolue Guo, PhD student in transnational and comparative literatures
o Translation of an untitled Facebook post dated April 26, from Mandarin to English, by Chris Song, a poet and journal editor based in Hong Kong.
– Houssem Ben Lazreg, PhD candidate, modern languages & cultural studies
o Translation from Arabic to English of the poem “A young woman” by Palestinian-Egyptian poet Tamim Al-Barghouti

The same day, another event that is part of the virtual St. Jerome’s Day event goes live. Created with the permission of the Cree Board of Health and Social Services of James Bay, it’s a look at The Sweet Bloods of Eeyou Istchee: Stories of Diabetes and the James Bay Cree, a text created by Indigenous storytellers and Ruth DyckFederauh, and its Mandarin translation by Leilei Chen. The broadcast can viewed on our YouTube page.