Events

Listen or even perform literature in different languages.
Olin Language Center, Room 203 (Tutoring Seminar)  3:00 pm – 4:00 pm EST/GMT-5
If you're interested in poetry and languages this is your event! Come and listen to your peers.

If you want to participate write to [email protected]. Please send the original text and an English translation. Any type of written art is accepted. Original works and translations are welcome too!

Food and drinks are provided.

Campus Center, Weis Cinema  8:30 pm – 10:30 pm EST/GMT-5

Jana Mader, Lecturer in the Humanities
Olin Humanities, Room 203  5:30 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
When we see, feel, and think of nature, it is never just an objective encounter with an outside world. Rather, landscapes carry meaning like a complex language, spoken and written in land, air, and water. Humans are storytellers in dialog with landscapes, influenced by their past, present and imagined future. When a group of German farmers who had fled famine and persecution settled along the Hudson, they were reminded of their river back home, the Rhine, and founded Rhinebeck. In a broad sense, then, they translated their home into their new place. This talk examines two river landscapes, the Hudson River Valley and the Rhine Valley in Germany, the contradictory narratives they were shaped by and the cultural translation of landscape, from the visual into the textual and what that entails. To what extent is our perception filtered through experience and our collective history?

A Lecture by ilija Trojanow
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  5:30 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
"Each day we are sold different versions of yesterday, but rarely offered a different tomorrow. The apocalypse streams into every household at a flat rate. In an era of dystopian forebodings, the future can no longer be taken for granted, and optimism is under siege. It seems high time for a reboot of utopian literature, in which a space that is not, may yet come to be in the future. We are near forgetting that history is not a foregone conclusion, and that fatalism is the last refuge of the coward. How we shape the future lies in our own hands, but with the prerequisite that we are ready to think ahead, into the unknown and uncertain, imagining alternatives to given paradigms. If the seeds of human progress are indeed planted by ideas before they can blossom into transformations, utopian narratives are of existential importance." Our guest, Ilija Trojanow, has spent the past  several years working on a utopian novel and exploring the history of Utopia. At a time when we reckon with our destruction of the natural world and of imagination, Trojanow's work encourages us to scrub clear our overclouded skies and to ask ourselves: what is literature if not unshackled fancy?

Campus Center, Weis Cinema  5:30 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
This event brings together in person on the Bard campus in Annandale three esteemed writers—Nuruddin Farah, Ilija Trojanow, and Aleksandar Hemon—to read from and discuss their work. As suggested by the titles North of Dawn (Farah) and Nowhere Man (Hemon), all three writers are concerned in their work with questions of place and displacement, of cultural difference and shared humanity, and of what Trojanow in his recent work calls “utopian narratives.” Each also has deep personal and professional connections to more than one language, and together they comprise a knowledge of literatures that is truly stunning in its diversity, including works composed in Arabic, Bulgarian, German, Serbo-Croation, and Somali, among other languages. All three authors are also active in a plurality of genres and media, which taken together includes novels, short stories, criticism, plays, film and television scripts, and music. On this evening, they will read and discuss their work and explore common concerns and points of difference, and will invite the audience to join in the conversation

Jana Schmidt, Visiting Fellow at the German Historical Institute, Washington
Olin Humanities, Room 202  5:30 pm – 6:45 pm EDT/GMT-4
The lecture takes the German Jewish writer Charlotte Beradt’s radio reportages on black politics from the 1960s as an example of the exile’s double vision - forever seeing the place you left “behind” the one you inhabit - and as a model for transforming memories into spaces of encounter, potential, and political relation. In rewriting the history of “Black Power” for German radio listeners, Beradt thereby also challenges us to perk up our ears to the resonances of seemingly distant historical experiences.