Translation of the Route: Reading and Conversation with Laura Wittner and Juana Adcock
This event, organised by The Poetry Translation Centre and The Queen's College Translation Exchange, will be chaired by the OCCT's Discussion Group Co-Convenor and Organising Committee member, Georgie Fooks.
Translation of the Route is the first collection by award-winning Argentine poet Laura Wittner to be available in English translation. In poems that are precise, frank and finely tuned, Wittner explores the specificities of daily life - thunder at night, coffee stains, fleeting conversations and the rest - as well as parental love, life after marriage, and the reignition of the self in middle age.
Laura Wittner is joined by her translator, the Mexican-Scottish poet Juana Adcock, for a dual-language reading from Translation of the Route and Q&A chaired by Georgina Fooks. The event will be followed by a drinks reception hosted by the Queens College Translation Exchange. Copies of Translation of the Route will be available to purchase from independent Oxford bookshop Caper at the event.
Laura Wittner is an award-winning poet and translator from Argentina. Her books of poetry include El pasillo del tren (1996), Los cosacos (1998), Las últimas mudanzas (2001), La tomadora de café (2005), Lluvias (2009), Balbuceos en una misma dirección (2011), La altura (2016), Lugares donde una no está (2017) and Traducción de la ruta (2020). She has also published more than 20 books for children, most recently Cual para tal (2022), ¿Y comieron perdices? (2023) and Se pide un deseo (2023), and a work of non-fiction, Se vive y se traduce (Entropía, 2021). As a literary translator Wittner has translated books by Leonard Cohen, David Markson, M. John Harrison, Cynan Jones, Claire-Louise Bennett, Katherine Mansfield and James Schuyler, among many others.
Juana Adcock is a Mexican poet, translator and editor based in Scotland. She is the author of Manca (Tierra Adentro, 2014); Split (Blue Diode, 2019), which was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was included in the Guardian's Best Poetry of 2019; Vestigial (Stewed Rhubarb, 2022); and I Sugar the Bones (Out-Spoken Press, 2024). She is co-editor of the anthology of poetry by Latin American women Temporary Archives (Arc Publications, 2022), and her translation of the Mè'phàà poet Hubert Matiúwàa's The Dogs Dreamt received a PEN Translates award. She has also translated Lola Ancira's The Sadness of Shadows (MTO Press, 2024).
Georgina Fooks is a current DPhil student in Spanish at the University of Oxford, researching twentieth-century Latin American poetry and translation. As a writer and translator from Spanish, her work has been published in Asymptote, Hopscotch Translation, and The Oxonian Review. She is the Director of Outreach at Asymptote and has studied poetry translation at the BCLT Summer School.
The Poetry Translation Centre gives the best contemporary poems from Africa, Asia and Latin America a new life in the English language, working with diaspora communities for whom poetry is of great importance. 2024 marks the PTC's 20th anniversary.
The Queen's College Translation Exchange (QTE) is an outreach centre based at The Queen's College, Oxford. Our mission is to inspire lifelong engagement in languages and international culture, and in particular to encourage young language-learners to continue with their studies through their schooling and beyond.
Further information about reaching Queen's College via public transport can be found here.
