Discussion Group: Jamie McKendrick's The Years and After

This week, in an event linked to Jamie McKendrick's exhibition The Years and After (hosted by St Anne's Mary Ogilvie Gallery throughout October), we were joined by the poet and artist. Wallace Stevens describes the relations between art and poetry as 'migratory passings to and fro, quickenings, Promethean liberations and discoveries.' Taking as a starting point his book of essays The Foreign Connection (as well as the exhibition The Years and After, and his poetry pamphlet The Years), Jamie McKendrick discussed with Matthew Reynolds and Anna Saroldi the interconnections between poetry, art, and translation, and some of those quickenings and discoveries.

Jamie McKendrick has published seven books of poetry, most recently Anomaly (Faber, 2018) as well as two Selected Poems. A self-illustrated poetry pamphlet The Years was published in 2020. He edited The Faber Book of 20th-Century Italian Poems in 2004, and has translated all six books of Giorgio Bassani's The Novel of Ferrara and the poetry of Antonella Anedda and Valerio Magrelli. A gathering of his writings on poetry and art, The Foreign Connection, was published in 2020.

Anna Saroldi is a doctoral student at the English Faculty of the University of Oxford. Her thesis analyses the translation of Italian literature into English in the second half of the twentieth century, with a particular focus on the collaboration between authors and translators (such as Bassani and Weaver, Bertolucci and Tomlinson, Fo and Jenkins). She has presented her research at various international conferences and published articles in English, French, and Italian on topics such as self-translation and heteroglossia. You can find more on her work here.