In addition to biennial conferences, INSL organizes symposia.
Translation Symposium, June 9, 2022
INSL (International Network for the Study of Lyric) arranged a fruitful and well-attended
English-language symposium on translation, Thursday, June 9, via Zoom.
Our program included a keynote by Cole Swensen, briefer presentations by Mariana
Machovà, Jahan Ramazani, and Yasmine Seale, and a Q&A with the audience.
Mariana Machovà currently teaches at the University of South Bohemia. Her main area of
research is modern American poetry, poetics, and translation theory and practice; she is also a
translator from English and Spanish into Czech. Her publications include Místa mezi misty, a
book on borders and meetings with the other in the poetry of Marianne Moore, Elizabeth
Bishop and Thom Gunn, and Elizabeth Bishop and Translation.
Jahan Ramazani is University Professor and Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the
University of Virginia, with specialties including postcolonial and global literatures. He is the
author of a number of books of criticism on poetry, editor of The Cambridge Companion to
Postcolonial Poetry, coeditor of two Norton Anthologies, and an associate editor of The
Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.
Yasmine Seale is a British-Syrian writer and translator. Her poetry, essays, visual art, and
translations from Arabic and French have appeared widely. She is the author, with Robin
Moger, of Agitated Air: Poems after Ibn Arabi. Other work includes Aladdin: A New
Translation and The Annotated Arabian Nights, both out from W. W. Norton. She has received a
PEN America Literary Grant and the Wasafiri New Writing Prize for Poetry. She lives in Paris.
Cole Swensen, Brown University, is a translator of contemporary French poetry, prose, and art
criticism. Her other publications include seventeen volumes of poetry and a volume of
essays, Noise That Stays Noise. She is the co-editor of the 2009 Norton anthology American
Hybrid and the founding editor of La Presse Books, which specializes in contemporary
experimental French writing translated by English-language poets.
Future symposia
In fall 2022 we are organizing additional symposia on translation, to be held in languages other
than English and including a range of literatures. These meetings will be announced through
our mailing list and on our web site.