At a moment when ethnonationalist and heteropatriarchal narratives erase the intertwined histories of global Jewish and Muslim communities and portray us as inherently antagonistic, diasporic scholars and artists connect through resonant forms and questions to find pleasure in differences.
On September 19, 2024 at 3:30 pm PT, please join the Department of English Language & Literatures (EL&L), the Centre for European Studies (CES), and the Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies (CENES) for “Translation, Multilingualism, Poetics: Language Work in Muslim and Jewish Diasporas.”
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This interdisciplinary roundtable brings together three Muslim and Jewish scholar-translator-poets — Denis Ferhatović, Rahat Kurd, and Anna Elena Torres — to discuss the cross-currents of their work and the generativity of translation and multilingualism in Jewish and Muslim cultural work, with particular attention to dissension from state-sponsored narratives.
Denis Ferhatović (Connecticut College) will discuss his new translations of sixteenth-century Ottoman Turkish and twentieth-century Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) poetry, as well as his original Bosnian-language poetry, in the context of excavating a fuller and queerer historical multilingualism in Bosnia, beyond modern South Slavo-centric heteronationalisms. Rahat Kurd, award-winning Vancouver poet, will share poems and research from her in-progress poetry collection, tentatively titled THE BOOK OF Z, on the Biblical/Quranic figure of Potiphar’s wife, known in multiple sources of Persian and Urdu poetry, and Persian/Mughal art, as Zulaikha. Anna Elena Torres (University of Chicago) will discuss material from her new book Horizons Blossom, Borders Vanish: Anarchism and Yiddish Literature, on Yiddish anarchist aesthetics from the nineteenth-century Russia through the modernist avant-gardes of Warsaw, Chicago, and London to contemporary antifascist composers. Rather than focusing on narratives of assimilation, Torres intervenes in earlier models of Jewish literature by centering refugee critiques of the border that cultivated stateless imaginations.
Whether you choose to join us in-person in Buchanan Tower 323 or virtually via Zoom, please register for the event using the link below. We look forward to sharing space with you.
“Translation, Multilingualism, Poetics: Language Work in Muslim and Jewish Diasporas” is the inaugural event in the 2024-25 EL&L Visiting Speaker Series and the inaugural 2024-25 CENES Ziegler Lecture. It is presented by the Muslim-Jewish Cultures in Europe Project based at UBC. This event is also co-sponsored by the UBC School of Creative Writing.
About the Speakers
Denis Ferhatović with his cats, as per popular request.
Denis Ferhatović (b. 1980) is a Bosnian-American scholar and writer, working and playing with English, French, Turkish, Indonesian, South Slavic microlanguages, and medieval Germanic and Romance languages. His interests include food, graphic novels, histories of Englishes, immigrant writing, postcolonial and queer theories, and translation. Denis’s essays, poems, reviews, translations, and co-translations have been published in Rumba under Fire, Index on Censorship, The Riddle Ages, Iberian Connections, Turkoslavia, Trinity Journal of Literary Translation (JoLT), DoubleSpeak, Asymptote, and Exchanges. His scholarly work appears in various journals and essay collections, most recently in Exemplaria and InterAlia: A Journal of Queer Studies. Denis’s monograph Borrowed Objects and the Art of Poetry: Spolia in Old English Verse (Manchester University Press, 2019) came out in paperback this spring.
Talk Abstract
Ferhatović will combine scholarship and personal reminiscences to illuminate the role Judeo-Spanish (or Ladino) might have in excavating a multilingual and queer Balkan past which counters South Slavic hetero-nationalist narratives and Western hegemonic construction of the Balkans as a site of unchanging savagery.
He will begin by looking at two individual words (haver “friend” and arrajlanearse / razrahatlenisati se, “to reach the point of complete relaxation”) and a rhymed saying (“Adorna un palíko se azerá un ermozíko”/ “Uredi klip, biće lip,” “Dress up a [little] stick and it will be a [little] beauty”) that have equivalents both in Judeo-Spanish and Bosnian. What common ideas of friendship, relaxation, and personal aesthetics do they embody?
Then, he will consider the Judeo-Spanish folk lyric, “Sekretos kero deskuvrir,” “I want to reveal secrets” (that figures prominently in Aleksandar Hemon’s latest novel, The World and All That It Holds [2023]), alongside the Macedonian folk lyric, “По друм одав, мајче, по друм шетав,” “I walked along the road, Ma, I strolled along the road.” They will help him think about the queer potential of shared Balkan cultural tradition of songs that employ the strategy of gender-ambiguous language. He will argue that, as texts and performances, both lyrics present possibilities not only for queer readings but also for a less restrictive understanding of gender relations in heteroerotic entanglements.
Rahat Kurd, a poet and cultural critic based in Vancouver, is currently at work on The Book of Z, her second book of poetry. Kurd is a close reader who draws on multilingual poetics and the ghazal tradition in Urdu and Persian literature. Her most recent essay, "Elegiac Moods: Letters to Agha Shahid Ali" was published in river in an ocean: essays on translation (Ed. Nuzhat Abbas, trace press: Toronto, 2023). Her book The City That Is Leaving Forever: Kashmiri Letters (Talonbooks 2021), is a hybrid of correspondence and poetry exchanged between Vancouver and Kashmir over a five-year period with poet Sumayya Syed. Cosmophilia (Talonbooks 2015) was her first book of poems.
Talk Abstract
Rahat Kurd will share art images from her background research and read an excerpt from her in-progress poetry manuscript, THE BOOK OF Z, written in the imagined voice of the woman identified as the wife of the Aziz in the Quran, and as Potiphar's wife in Biblical texts. In multiple poems in Persian, Urdu, Arabic, Bengali, and other languages, and in Persian/Mughal visual art forms, her scandal-causing "temptress" persona is redeemed and celebrated as Zulaikha, symbolic of the soul's longing for the Divine. The patriarchal sources give us robust evidence of the way early prophetic stories migrated between religious communities before the 20th century, and THE BOOK OF Z partly comes out of the wish to take this evidence into a reclamatory feminist/decolonial direction - grounded in the Abrahamic traditions, but certainly not limited to us as their inheritors.
Anna Elena Torres is an Assistant Professor in the departments of Comparative Literature and Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. Torres is the author of Horizons Blossom, Borders Vanish: Anarchism and Yiddish Literature (Yale University Press, 2024) and co-editor of With Freedom in Our Ears: Histories of Jewish Anarchism (University of Illinois Press, 2023). Torres’ publications include work in Prooftexts, Jewish Quarterly Review, Nashim, make/shift: a journal of feminisms in motion, In geveb, and ArtsEverywhere. Torres’ creative practice has included work as a community muralist, poet and translator, and participant in the Venice Biennale’s Yiddishland Pavilion (2022).
Talk Abstract
Torres examines Yiddish anarchist aesthetics from the nineteenth-century Russian proletarian immigrant poets through the modernist avant-gardes of Warsaw, Chicago, and London to contemporary antifascist composers. She traces Jewish anarchist strategies for negotiating surveillance, censorship, detention, and deportation, revealing the connection between Yiddish modernism and struggles for free speech, women’s bodily autonomy, and the transnational circulation of avant-garde literature. Rather than focusing on narratives of assimilation, Torres intervenes in earlier models of Jewish literature by centering refugee critique of the border. Jewish deportees, immigrants, and refugees opposed citizenship as the primary guarantor of human rights. Instead, they cultivated stateless imaginations, elaborated through literature.
