Poets in the Galleries v3: Sinan Antoon Responds to Tarjama / Translation
Sunday, September 27, 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm, 2009
Sinan Antoon
The Poets in the Galleries series utilizes the Museum’s exhibition space as an invigorating site for exploration, interactive readings and discussions. Each Sunday in September, a different poet will conduct a lively presentation in response to the Museum’s current exhibition, Tarjama/Translation. These gifted participants, all distinguished and emerging voices in the local, national and international literary scene, have been asked to devise an original presentation in response to the works on view. The current exhibition lends itself especially well to the series, by creating an open-ended forum in which the poets and visitors alike can explore the related themes of how poetry is translated across languages and cultures. Join us for a cocktail hour followed by the interactive gallery tour & readings by a different poet each week. Participating poets include Amir Parsa, Ali Husain Mir, Ammiel Alcalay, and Sinan Antoon.
Sinan Antoon is a poet, novelist, and translator. He was born in Baghdad and studied English literature at Baghdad University before moving to the United States after the 1991 Gulf War. He did his graduate studies at Georgetown Harvard where he earned a doctorate in Arabic Literature in 2006. His poems and essays (in Arabic and English) have appeared in various journals and publications in the Arab world, as well as The Nation, Middle East Report, al-Ahram Weekly, Banipal, Ploughshares, World Literature Today, and the Journal of Palestine Studies. He is the author of The Baghdad Blues (Harbor Mountain Press, 2007) and a I`jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody (City Lights Books, 2007). Translations have appeared in Portuguese, German and Norwegian. His poetry was anthologized in Iraqi Poetry Today and Inclined to Speak: Arab American Poetry. A new collection of poetry and his second novel (both in Arabic) will be published in Beirut in 2010.
He has also contributed numerous translations of Arabic poetry into English and vice versa. His co-translation of Mahmud Darwish’s poetry was nominated for the PEN Prize for translation in 2004. His translation of Darwish’s In the Presence of Absence is forthcoming from Archipelago in 2010. Antoon returned to his native Baghdad in 2003 as a member of InCounter Productions to co-direct/produce the documentary About Baghdad about the lives of Iraqis in a post-Saddam occupied Iraq. Antoon is an Assistant Professor at New York University. www.sinaan.com
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