Last week, the penultimate event in this year’s Reading the World Conversation Series took place and featured Bill Martin (former Literary Program Manager at the Polish Cultural Institute and translator of Lovetown) and poet Piotr Sommer (Continued) discussion Piotr’s work, some general Polish poetry trends, etc. Attached below you can watch the event in its entirety.

On a related note, Wednesday is the final RTWCS event of the year: Thomas Pletzinger and Ross Benjamin will be here to talk about Funeral for a Dog. All the details can be found here. More plugging of this come Wednesday, but I’ll guarantee that it’s one of the liveliest RTWCS events to date. And, seeing that sex sells, I’m just going say that all the ladies in attendance will swoon . . . Hear that ladies? SWOON. So you bring the smelling salts and we’ll bring the hot literati.

As mentioned in the previous post, our second RTW event of the spring is almost upon us, and it’s happening this Wednesday, April 13, at the University of Rochester. All the breathtaking details follow below.

Reading the World Conversation Series
Piotr Sommer & Bill Martin:
Polish Poetry and Translation

APRIL 13, 2011
Wednesday, 7:30 p.m
Sloan Auditorium, Goergen Hall
University of Rochester
(Presented with the Skalny Center.
Free and open to the public)

What translates and what doesn’t in contemporary poetry? What are mutual inspirations of Polish and Anglo-American poetry today? This event will feature a poetry reading by Piotr Sommer, followed by a conversation between Piotr Sommer and Bill Martin.

Piotr Sommer, preeminent Polish poet and Visiting Professor at the Skalny Center for Polish and Central European Studies, has published several dozen books, including poetry, literary criticism, and anthologies. He is also a well-known translator of contemporary English-language poets and is the editor of Literatura na Świecie (World Literature), a Warsaw-based magazine of international writing.

Bill Martin, former Literary Program Manager at the Polish Cultural Institute, was responsible for the “Polish Literature” issue of the Chicago Review, which marked the first English publication for dozens of Polish writers. His translations from Polish and German include Natasza Goerke’s Farewells to Plasma and Erich Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives.

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(This event is presented by the Skalny Center for Polish & Central European Studies at the University of Rochester and hosted by Open Letter and University of Rochester Arts & Sciences. It is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts.)

As officially announced at Bacacay, (the official blog of the Polish Cultural Institute in New York) Jerzy Pilch’s The Mighty Angel has been selected as the September title for the European Book Club.

It’s an honor to have one of our titles selected for this program, especially since this is the first time the Polish Cultural Institute is participating. (And it’s super-cool that the book club discussion will be taking place in the Solas Bar . . . )

If you’re not familiar with the European Book Club, here’s a nice write-up that Bill posted at Bacacay:

Founded in 2008, the European Book Club is a collaboration between a handful of New York-city based European cultural institute: the Austrian Cultural Forum, the Czech Center, the French Institute Alliance Française, the Goethe-Institut, the Istituto Italiano di Cultura, the Polish Cultural Institute, and the Instituto Cervantes. Each month, a different participating institute hosts a book club meeting, which is then “mirrored” at the Brooklyn Public Library later the same month—a measure just introduced due to the overwhelming popularity of the Book Club last year and the fact that so many people had to be turned away. So, for instance, Jachým Topol’s classic City Sister Silver will be discussed tonight at the Czech Center, and the mirror session will take place tomorrow night in Brooklyn. Next month, Muriel Barbery’s acclaimed novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog will be hosted by the French Institute Alliance Française on April 13, and reproduced in Brooklyn on April 21. We’ll be holding our session in September at Solas Bar (appropriately enough), in the same second storey room of this fine East Village establishment where the St. Mark’s Bookshop reading series takes place. If you’ll be in New York then, make sure to check back here or at http://www.europeanbookclub.org sometime around the middle of August for information on how to sign up. Registration for the French session next month is already open.

The Polish Cultural Institute in New York recently launched Bacacay, a new blog with info on Polish literature for English-language readers, translators, reviewers, publishers, and so on.

Even though the site is brand new, Bill Martin has done a great job putting together some really interesting, informative posts, such as this one about the Polish nominations for the European Union Literary Prize. (Speaking of which, we should have a separate post about this prize, which just started this year and will honor a contemporary author from each of twelve countries. More on the specifics soon . . .)

It’s interesting to see the list of Polish nominations for the prize, especially since this info doesn’t appear to be available on EU Literary Prize website. Unfortunately, as Bill points out, only one of the twelve Polish nominations is a woman . . .