Aug 04 2023 to Aug 05 2023 9 a.m.

EVENT HAS ENDED

Where

Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Bangalore

716, Chinmaya Mission Hospital Road, First Stage, Indiranagar, Bengaluru 560038

Event Description

Vivek Narayanan in a performance from his book of poems After Library @ Goethe-Institut Chennai and Basement 2 present ‘Meet the Author’ - Vivek Narayanan in a performance from his book of poems After After is a collection of poems inspired by Valmiki’s Ramayana, where Narayanan pushes the voice of the poem to engage with modern experience and politics, initiating a transformative conversation across time. Vivek Narayanan in performance from his book of poems, After.

Vivek Narayanan’s book of poems called AFTER is published by New York Review Books / HarperCollins India, 2022. Narayanan was born in India in 1972 to Tamil-speaking parents and grew up in Lusaka, Zambia. He did undergraduate and graduate study (in cultural anthropology and creative writing) in the United States, and taught at the University of Kwazulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa. In the mid-2000s, he was a mentor and coordinator at Sarai-CSDS in New Delhi, where he explored different approaches to reading and performing poetry in collaborative experiments across technology, physical space, movement, site-specific work and audience interaction.

Narayanan has been a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University (2013-14) and a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library (2015-16). His poems, stories, translations and critical essays have appeared in journals like Poetry, The Paris Review, Chimurenga Chronic, Poetry at Sangam, Granta, Poetry Review (UK), Modern Poetry in Translation, Harvard Review, Agni, The Caribbean Review of Books, Aroop and elsewhere, as well as in anthologies like The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem and The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poetry. A full-length collection of his selected poems in Swedish translation was published by the Stockholm-based Wahlström & Widstrand in 2015. Narayanan currently teaches poetry in the MFA program at George Mason University, where he also sits on the advisory boards of the Cheuse International Writers Center and Poetry Daily.

Imaginary Translations (Workshop): This workshop will explore the relationships among translation, poetry, creativity and multilingualism in what might be unusual and unexpected ways. We will dwell on the open-ended generative power of translational practice, how it draws on external sources but is ultimately interested in bringing something new and never seen before into the world. We'll think about the potential difference between an artist's and a scholar's approach. We’ll focus on what might today be called experimental or radical translation practice, through in-workshop collaborative and interactive writing games. The workshop will begin with poetry, but practitioners of all kinds are welcome.

All languages welcome; multilingual backgrounds are welcome but not required.