Saturday, November 5, 2022 at 7:00-8:30 PM PT
Free with RSVP

The Rubel Room at the University of Arizona Poetry Center
1508 E Helen St, Tucson AZ 85721 and livestreamed

This event is free and open to the public.

There will also be a recording available at this link in a few weeks’ time.
Readers include Sean LaRiche (Polish) – scroll down for full bio.

Listen in as the ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorship Program cohorts present readings of literature translated into English from around the world! The program pairs emerging translators with an established translator to work together on a book-length literary translation over the course of nine months, providing the next generation of translators of world literature with support and community as they hone their craft. These 14 mentees translate collectively from 10 different languages in multiple genres, sharing a wealth of writers, languages, and stories with a broad readership.

This is a featured event at ALTA45, the American Literary Translators Association’s 45th annual program, and is part of the Arizona Translates! series. The reading is hosted by the Tucson Humanities Festival at the UA College of Humanities and the UA Poetry Center.

Sean LaRiche
Sean LaRiche will translate Jakub Kornhauser’s The Yeast Works [Drożdżownia] from Polish.

Sean LaRiche is a clinical social worker and works as a psychotherapist with children and adolescents on an inpatient psychiatric unit at a hospital in Charlotte, North Carolina. He is originally from Cleveland, Ohio, where ill-fated attempts to learn Spanish in middle and high school convinced him to never study a foreign language again. Yet, after several fascinating classes in Russian literature and culture with Joanna Hubbs at Hampshire College, he began to study Russian. His studies focused on history and foreign policy, but he stubbornly continued to study the language. In his final semester, he was introduced to the process of translation while taking Joseph Brodsky’s course on the 19^th-century Russian poets. The poet would translate the poems of his predecessors in front of the class, haloed in cigarette smoke, digressing on word choices, the structures of the poems, and the lives of the poets, making it seem as if nothing were more vital than bringing these poet’s words across time and into that room. It was a profound, humbling experience.

In the mid-1990s, Sean began teaching English at a public school in Kaliningrad, Russia and traveled to Poland often. On a trip to Krakow, he bought Czesław Milosz’s Collected Poems and was drawn deeply into the enchanting translations. He was spurred by these readings to move to Poland and learn Polish. This led to a year living and teaching in the mountains of southern Poland followed by several years in Warsaw where he was able to see Milosz read his poems. At another poetry reading in Warsaw (the wonderful Edwin Morgan with Piotr Sommer reading translations), he met his wife. After returning to the United States, he taught English as a Second Language at a large public high school in Charlotte while completing a Master’s thesis in English Literature about the influence of Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and James on the work of the Polish writer Gustaw Herling-Grudziński. While translating passages from Herling-Grudziński’s journal and stories, Sean realized he enjoyed translating more than academic writing. Several years later, with three children and while training as a social worker, he began to translate some poetry and essays, short pieces he discovered in the journal Zeszyty Literackie, and he published translations of essays by the Polish neurologist Adam Szczuciński in the journal Agni.

More recently, he has been working on several projects, including a translation of a collection of prose poems by Jakub Kornhauser called The Yeast Works [Drożdżownia] which he completed during the ALTA mentorship with Bill Johnston, sponsored by the Polish Cultural Institute New York. These poems, somewhat cubist in their structure, colored by the paintings of Soutine, Malevich, Klee, Ensor, and Schiele (that give many of them their titles), evoke the atmospheres of old villages, buildings, and homes and the vanished lives of their Jewish community, often through the movement of children through these peculiar landscapes and layers of time. It has been a welcome transport from work in the hospital during the pandemic for Sean to walk out to his car, remove his masks, and read one of these poems while jotting down a few notes towards the next translation as he eats lunch. Sean feels a deep debt to Polish literature, to the role it has played in his life, and would like to honor this by continuing and expanding his translation work over the coming years.

Bill Johnston’s (mentor) awards include the 2019 National Translation Award in Poetry for Adam Mickiewicz’s verse narrative Pan Tadeusz (Archipelago Books), a translation supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship; the 2017 Found in Translation Award for Tomasz Różycki’s mock epic poem Twelve Stations (Zephyr Press); the 2014 Transatlantyk Prize; and the 2012 PEN Translation Prize and Best Translated Book Award, both for Wiesław Myśliwski’s novel Stone Upon Stone (Archipelago Books). He has twice been on the faculty at the Bread Loaf Translators Conference, and has previously served five times as mentor for the ALTA mentorships. He teaches literary translation at Indiana University.

The ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorship Program is designed to establish and facilitate a close working relationship between an experienced translator and an emerging translator on a literary translation project selected by the emerging translator. The mentorship duration is approximately nine months. The emerging translator is expected to choose a project that can be completed in that time, and they will only be advised on that particular project. ALTA’s Emerging Translator Mentorship Program was founded in 2015 by former ALTA Board member Allison M. Charette.