Students on a theater trip in Iceland.

Comparative Literature & English

READING BY VINCENT BROQUA (in English and French) from his newest books RECOVERY and PHOTOCALL

University Room: Omid & Gisel Kordestani Rooftop Conference Center (Q-801)
Wednesday, February 22, 2023 - 18:30 to 21:30

THE CENTER FOR WRITERS AND TRANSLATORS
THE DEPARTMENT OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AND ENGLISH
AND THE PROGRAM IN CREATIVE WRITING

PRESENT:

A MULTILINGUAL READING BY VINCENT BROQUA from his newest books RECOVERY and PHOTOCALL

In conversation with translator COLE SWENSEN on 22 FEBRUARY 2023

RECEPTION AT 18H30 PM
READING BEGINS AT 19H

ABOUT RECOVERY:

Recovery is an exhibition, an inquiry, a translative text. It seeks to vivify experience through a politics of gayness and an active demonstration of queerness. It engages with, in Marcel Mauss’s term, “techniques of the body,” from discrete gestures to athletic maneuvers and intimate caresses. By exploring weakness, it reshapes everyday actions and words into poetic acts of recovery.

The book begins in the diverse: Recovery is comprised of tracks (as in skiing, as in DJ-ing, as in walking) that readers are free to mix, to dance on, or to roam around in. Its prose, its poetry, its essays, and its translations are like method air. As in skateboarding, you are alone on your board, you ride the curbs, you jump the obstacles, you alley-oops (from the French “allez hop”), or you do darkslides, and yet you are never alone; you are doing it with other skateboarders. A painter painting alone in front of a cave looks like one of the rocks; onomatopoeias seem universal, but are not; a poem in Persian gets translated into a collaboration.

Recovery was published originally in France as Récupérer. This English edition, translated by Cole Swensen and augmented by texts written directly in English by the author and collaborators, has been transformed to adapt to this new context.
 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Vincent Broqua is a writer and translator. He and his heteronyms work with text, video and narrative as ways of entering the diverse, that special place between the unnamed and the named. He writes in French and English.

He is a professor at the University of Paris 8 where he teaches in the MA in Literary Creation at Paris 8. In 2000, he co-created the collective Double Change (doublechange.org), and in 2010 he co-founded the multilingual journal Quaderna (quaderna.org). He is also the co-curator of the Poets and Critics series. His book Photocall, projet d'attendrissement was awarded the 2021 Prize for gay novel/poetry in France. He performed his work in contexts such as the Segue Reading series in New York, UC Berkeley, UC Irvine, the Poetry Library (London), at the Palais de Tokyo, the Maison de la poésie in Paris, the CipM in Marseille and various festivals in Europe. His work has appeared in The Chicago review, Jacket, Jacket2, How2, READ, Place, ...


Read more about Recovery here: https://www.pamenarpress.com/product-page/by-vincent-broqua-translated-by-cole-swensen-recovery

Find out more about Broqua's book Photocall here: https://www.lespetitsmatins.fr/collections/litterature/les-grands-soirs/253-photocall-projet-d-attendrissement.html

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR:

Cole Swensen is the author of nineteen collections of poetry, most recently And And And, Art in Time, On Walking On (Nightboat, 2017), Gave (Omnidawn, 2017), and Landscapes on a Train (Nightboat 2015), and a volume of critical essays. Her poetic collections turn around specific research projects, including ones on public parks, visual art, illuminated manuscripts, and ghosts. Her work has won the National Poetry Series, the Iowa Poetry Prize, the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award, and the PEN USA Award in Literary Translation. A former Guggenheim Fellow, she is the co-editor of the Norton anthology American Hybrid and the founding editor of La Presse Poetry (www.lapressepoetry.com). She teaches at Brown University.

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