Translation as Deep Reading and Creative Practice: A conversation and a poetry reading

All are welcome to the opening evening of the EUTERPE York-Coventry Spring School, setting the tone for a week of events with an evening on the joys and challenges of translating multilingual authors and texts.

Dr Nicoletta Asciuto (Department of English and Related Literature) will talk about her interest in recuperating early twentieth-century women authors through translation, and her recently published Italian translation of Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: A Poem (1920).

Dr Boriana Alexandrova (Centre for Women’s Studies and Department of English & Related Literature) will discuss the power and peculiarity of infamously impenetrable multilingual texts, like James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), and archives, such as the messy and marvellous post-war archive of Surrealist queer couple and anti-Nazi Resistance fighters, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore.

About the speakers:

Dr Nicoletta Asciuto is Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature at the University of York and York’s CI on EUTERPE. Her most recent publications include a cluster for Modernism/modernity, entitled “Modernist Periodical Studies and the Transnational Turn” (2023), and her monograph Brilliant Modernism: Cultures of Light and Modernist Poetry (Johns Hopkins University Press 2025). Nicoletta has also published literary translations, the latest of which feature in Early Radio: An Anthology of European Texts and Translations, edited by Emilie Morin (Edinburgh University Press, 2023). Her Italian translation of Hope Mirrlees’s Paris. A Poem (1920), the first translation of Mirrlees’s work into Italian, is out in May 2025 with Interno Poesia.

Dr Boriana Alexandrova is Senior Lecturer at York's Centre for Women's Studies and York’s PI on EUTERPE. She is a scholar of European modernism, multilingualism, translation, and contemporary queer and feminist writing and performance, with a focus on disability, trauma, and artistic research methods. She is the author of Joyce, Multilingualism, and the Ethics of Reading (2020) and articles on translation, gender, the body, disability, and trauma in the works of James Joyce, Eimear McBride, Carmen Maria Machado, and Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, among others. Alongside EUTERPE, she is part of another international collaborative project, uncovering the unpublished writings of Surrealist queer couple and anti-Nazi Resistance fighters, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, and her second monograph: Storytelling the Unspeakable: On the Artistic Languages of Trauma and Chronic Pain.

Chair: Alice Flinta (Centre for Women’s Studies) 

Guest interlocutor: Prof Kimberly Campanello (University of Leeds)  

Photo Credit: Emily

This is a hybrid event. Wine reception to follow.

Book tickets