Amid the installations of the Contemporary Art Museum Houston, join innovative translators Matvei Yankelevich and Rosa Alcalá in a reading of their recent work, followed by a conversation on the art of translation, with each other and the audience, moderated by Roberto Tejada. Matvei translated Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms and co-translated the National Translation Award-winning An Invitation for Me to Thinkby Alexander Vvedensky. Among many others, Rosa translated Spit Temple: The Selected Performances of Cecilia Vicuña, which was a runner-up for the 2013 PEN Award for Translation. After the translation event, check out the solo exhibition of the artist MPA; combining advanced technology and Minimalist aesthetics, MPA’s newly commissioned work The Interview: Red, Red Future centers around the planet Mars and sheds light on invisible forces and power.
Matvei Yankelevich is the author of Alpha Donut (United Artists), Boris by the Sea (Octopus), and Some Worlds for Dr. Vogt, recently released by Black Square Editions. He is the translator of Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms, and co-translator of the National Translation Award-winning An Invitation for Me to Think by Alexander Vvedensky. He is a co-founder of the Ugly Duckling Presse editorial collective, which publishes poetry, translation, and Emergency INDEX, an annual anthology of performance art documentation. He currently teaches at Columbia University's School of the Arts, Queens College, and Bard College.
Rosa Alcalá is a poet and translator originally from Paterson, NJ. She has published two books of poetry, Undocumentaries (2010) and The Lust of Unsentimental Waters (2012), both from Shearsman Books. A third poetry collection, M(y)Other Tongue, is forthcoming from
Futurepoem Books. Spit Temple: The Selected Performances of Cecilia Vicuña (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012), edited and translated by Alcalá, was a runner-up for the 2013 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. A recipient of an NEA Translation Fellowship, Alcalá is Associate Professor in the Department of Creative Writing and Bilingual MFA Program at the University of Texas-El Paso.
