Book Launch: "Small Bibles for Bad Times" by Liliane Atlan, translated by Marguerite Feitlowitz
OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Book Launch: Small Bibles for Bad Times: Selected Prose and Poetry by Liliane Atlan, translated by Marguerite Feitlowitz. Visionary French poet/playwright/novelist Liliane Atlan was driven to “find language to say the unsayable . . . to [find a way] to integrate within our conscience, without dying in the attempt, the shattering experience of Auschwitz.” Recipient of the Shoah Prize and a career achievement award from the Festival d’Avignon, she was a genre-defying, feminist and political writer, active in France and in Israel, where she made work with Palestinian theatre artists. From murderous history, Atlan (1932-2011) created a darkly radiant body of work.
This event will begin with a staged reading from Mister Fugue (Atlan’s best-known play, also translated by Feitlowitz) performed by Drama Faculty Kirk Jackson, with students Joshua Goldberg, David Guzman, and Ruby Lowenstein.
Marguerite Feitlowitz is the author of A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture. Acclaimed internationally, it was a New York Times Notable Book and Notable Paperback, as well as a finalist for the PEN New England-L.L. Winship Prize. The book is published in Spanish (Buenos Aires: Ed. Prometeo); excerpts, in translation, have appeared in France, Israel and Spain. She has published five volumes of literary translations from French and Spanish, including, most recently, Small Bibles for Bad Times: Selected Prose and Poetry by Liliane. She has also published translations of fiction, plays and poetry by Luisa Valenzuela, Griselda Gambaro, and Salvador Novo. A 2019 NEA Fellow, she is currently translating the work of Chilean poet Ennio Moltedo. Her fiction, poetry, essays, art criticism, and translations have appeared in Bomb, InTranslation@Brooklyn Rail, 91 st Meridian,TriQuarterly, Salmagundi, Les Temps Modernes, el viejo topo, City Lights Review, The Literary Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and numerous other journals and anthologies in the Americas, Europe, and Israel. Feitlowitz has held two Fulbright Fellowships to Argentina (including a Senior Scholar Award), a Bunting Fellowship in nonfiction, and a Harvard Faculty Research Grant. She was a visiting scholar at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. At Bennington, she has taught literature, writing, and literary translation since 2002, and is the founding director of Bennington Translates, which brings acclaimed literary, humanitarian, and scholarly translators to campus, and sponsors (M)othertongues, a student-created website publishing multilingual, multicultural literary, art and performance pieces.