William Wells: “Keeping Faith in Word and Spirit: Translating the Work of Two Jewish/Italian Poets”

November 15, 2012 | 2:00-3:45 PM | Free & Open to the Public
Stevenson Fireside Lounge, Room 177, UC Santa Cruz
Directions and Parking Information

Will’s most recent book of poems, Unsettled Accounts, won the 2009 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize and was published in February of 2010 by Ohio University/Swallow Press. On its basis, he was chosen as a Walter E. Dakin Fellow in Poetry for the 2010 Sewanee Writers’ Conference and as 2010 Ohio Poet of the Year (selected by the State Library of Ohio). He has previously won an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council (1996), an N.E.A. Fellowship in poetry, and four scholarly fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, most of which have involved translation of various Italian poets. Most recently, this involved translating the sonnets of Sara Coppia Sullam during the NEH Summer Institute on “Venice, The Jews and Italian Culture” in 2008. Subsequent presentations and articles have focused upon the translation of Sullam’s sonnets. Other N.E.H. experiences included a summer Institute on Literary Translation at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1988. His previous volume of poems, Conversing with the Light, was chosen by Henry Taylor for the 1987 Anhinga Prize and published by Anhinga Press of Tallahassee. He has also translated Umberto Saba’s first volume of poems, Trieste and a Lady, and that volume is currently in circulation with publishers. His current poetry manuscript, tentatively, titled Scraps and Damaged Lots, is nearly finished. He serves as Professor of English and Dean of Arts & Sciences at Rhodes State College in Ohio.
 

This event is presented by the Center for Jewish Studies, with cosponsorship by the David B. Gold Foundation.