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Nordic Literature in Translation: Damascus, Atlantis with Marie Silkeberg, Kelsi Vanada, Bernhard Woestheinrich & David Rothenberg

On April 23, join us for a Nordic Literature in Translation event with author Marie Silkeberg, translator Kelsi Vanada and designer Bernhard Woestheinrich on Silkeberg’s 2021 book "Damascus, Atlantis," which was recently longlisted for the 2022 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. With moderator David Rothenberg, the publisher of Terra Nova Press, they’ll discuss Silkeberg’s poetry collection and Vanada’s translation of her works, for which Vanada won ASF’s Nadia Christensen Translation Prize in 2018.

Silkeberg has been a major voice in Swedish poetry since the early 1990s. In these poems, translated by Kelsi Vanada and drawn from her two most recent collections, "Atlantis" and "Till Damaskus" (written with Ghayath Almadhoun, whose poems from the collection were published in English translation as "Adrenalin"), she tackles some of the most wrenching events of recent decades—globalization, the escalating war in Syria, and its ongoing aftermath and consequences. The speakers of these poems live in a reality informed by these events and by an older European history. Taking the standpoint of listener and observer forced to confront the horrors in present tense, the poems question how we share the pain of others, and how the meeting between different experiences of trauma influences language. The poems are matched with stills from Silkeberg’s poetry films, putting word and image in dialogue to explore ruins, cityscapes, the echoes of history, all into the depth of language’s power.

Now in its 43rd year, ASF’s Annual Translation Competition awards prizes for outstanding translations of poetry, fiction, drama, or literary prose written by a 20th- or 21st-century Nordic author. The Nadia Christensen Prize recognizes an outstanding translation of a literary text from a Nordic language into the English.

Please share audience questions in the chat or send them in advance to info@amscan.org. Select questions will be chosen for a Q&A following the conversation.​

Apr 23, 2022 01:00 PM in Eastern Time (US and Canada)