Nissan Seminar: Translating Where the Wild Ladies Are: A conversation on feminist solidarity and the modern-day legacy of ghost stories

Co-Convenors: Juliana Buriticá Alzate, Jenny Guest, Hugh Whittaker

Speaker(s): Polly Barton (Visiting Fellow at Queens’ College, Oxford) and Juliana Buriticá Alzate (FAME, Oxford)

Translating Where the Wild Ladies Are: A conversation on feminist solidarity and the modern-day legacy of ghost stories

This event features a conversation between award-winning writer and literary translator Polly Barton and literary translator and lecturer of Japanese literature Juliana Buriticá Alzate. The two will compare and contrast their experiences translating Matsuda’s book into English and Spanish, highlighting how the broader context of the book and its implications for feminist solidarity and practice informed their granular choices. There will be time for questions from the audience.  

 

Polly Barton, a Visiting Fellow at Queens’ College for the academic year 2022-3, is a critically-acclaimed writer and translator of Japanese literature and non-fiction. In 2019, she was awarded the Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize for her non-fiction debut Fifty Sounds (Fitzcarraldo Editions/Liveright). Her recent translations includeThere’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura (Bloomsbury, 2020), and So We Look to the Sky by Misumi Kubo (Arcade, 2021). In 2021, she won the World Fantasy Award for Best Collection for her translation of Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda (Tilted Axis Press/Soft Skull Press, 2020). 

 

Juliana Buriticá Alzate is the Departmental Lecturer in Modern Japanese Literature for the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and The Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, she is affiliated with Pembroke college. She is a researcher and educator in the fields of Japanese Literature and Gender and Sexuality Studies, as well as a literary translator. She has translated Aoko Matsuda’s Where The Wild Ladies Are into Spanish (Quaterni 2022) and is currently working on a collection of poetry by Hiromi Itō (Insensata, forthcoming 2023).

 

This event is in association with Queen’s College Translation Exchange and TORCH as part of the Humanities Cultural Programme.