Wednesday 20th May
6.30pm to 9pm
In this event, translator Sophie Lewis joins poet and translator Beverley Bie Brahic to explore translating Hélène Cixous, the iconic French writer and theorist, and feminist poetics in translation. Chaired by Kristen Vida Alfaro, managing director of Silver Press and director of Tilted Axis Press, which specialises in translated literature, the conversation will move between languages, body and text, and the restless force of écriture féminine.
In Angst, Cixous writes at the edge of fear and revelation, moving between autobiography, dream, nightmare and stream-of-consciousness. To translate her involves following rhythm, breath, rupture, puns and play. Considering translation as a form of écriture féminine in its own right, the panel will reflect on the complexities and intrigues of translating Cixous's textures, wordplay and neologisms.
Hélène Cixous was born in Oran, Algeria, and is emeritus professor of literature at the Université Paris VIII, where she founded and directed the Centre d'études féminines. She is the author of more than seventy works of fiction, plays, and collections of critical essays; recent titles in English translation include So Close, Zero’s Neighbour: Sam Beckett, Hemlock, and Philippines. In her 1975 essay ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, she created the term écriture féminine to describe a uniquely female style of writing.
Sophie Lewis is a London-born translator and editor. Working from Portuguese and French, she has translated works by Victor Heringer, Cidinha da Silva, Patrícia Melo, João Gilberto Noll, Sheyla Smanioto and Micheliny Verunschk; as well as Marcel Aymé, Josephine Baker, Annie Ernaux, Violette Leduc, Noémi Lefebvre, Nastassja Martin, Françoise Sagan, Leïla Slimani, Stendhal and Jules Verne, among others. With Gitanjali Patel, she co-founded the Shadow Heroes translation workshops enterprise – www.shadowheroes.org. Lewis’s translations have been shortlisted for the Scott Moncrieff and Republic of Consciousness prizes, and longlisted for the International Booker Prize. She won the 2022 French-American Foundation prize for non-fiction translation with Martin’s anthropology memoir In the Eye of the Wild.
Kristen Vida Alfaro is a London-based publisher, editor, and writer. She is the Director of Tilted Axis Press and Managing Director of Silver Press. Her work focuses on relational editorial practice, translation, and the conditions that shape how literature is written, published, and circulated. She is a co-founder of UK Small Press Futures.
Canadian poet and translator Beverley Bie Brahic lives in Paris and Northern California. Her translations include books by the contemporary French writers, Hélène Cixous and Yves Bonnefoy. She is the translator of Guillaume Apollinaire: The Little Auto, winner of the 2013 Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize, and Francis Ponge:Unfinished Ode to Mud, a finalist for the 2009 Popescu Prize, both from CB editions in London. Her second collection of poems, White Sheets, was a finalist for the 2013 Forward Prize for Best Collection and Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Apple Thieves, her fifth collection, was published by Carcanet Press in 2024.