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A Celebration of “Multiverse:” An Evening with Tzveta Sofronieva and Jeffrey Yang (October 23rd)
A Celebration of “Multiverse”: An Evening with Tzveta Sofronieva and Jeffrey Yang (October 23rd), © White Pine Press
Deutsches Haus at NYU, Goethe-Institut New York, White Pine Press, and the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa present a celebration of “Multiverse: New and Selected Poems” by Tzveta Sofronieva (White Pine Press, 2020).
Deutsches Haus at NYU, Goethe-Institut New York, White Pine Press, and the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa present a celebration of “Multiverse: New and Selected Poems” by Tzveta Sofronieva (White Pine Press, 2020). After reading excerpts from her book, Sofronieva will be joined by Jeffrey Yang to reflect upon her multilingual writing, the cosmos, and the art of literary translation.
About “Multiverse”:
“Multiverse: New and Selected Poems” brings together four decades of work by multilingual poet Tzveta Sofronieva, of whom Joseph Brodsky said, “Listen carefully; she has something to say.” Sofronieva’s poetry is wide-ranging in form and content, with both short lines and sequences of long verses; no matter the form, though, she adopts playful and experimental language, exploring science and other topics.
About the Speakers:
Tzveta Sofronieva is an author of poetry, essays, short stories, plays, and literary installations. She is also an editor, anthologist, and poetry translator. In 2012, her book A Hand Full of Water, translated from German by Chantal Wright with a 2009 PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant, won the first Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation and was published by White Pine Press. Multiverse: New and Selected Poems (2020), edited by J. Kwon Dobbs, is her second book with the press. As described by David St. John, this “protean and intellectually liquid, iridescent in its fragments and radically innovative in its project of producing constructions/constellations of lyric materiality…wildly provocative collection that explodes the habitual verse of our moment even as it maps a possible trajectory into our literary future” includes poems and otherverses written in German, Bulgarian, and English, as well as translingual poetry. Poems by Sofronieva have been translated into 19 languages. Born in Sofia, Bulgaria, and at home in Berlin, Germany, since 1992, she is currently writer in residence at the IWP in Iowa.
Jeffrey Yang's most recent poetry collection is Line and Light. His translation of Bei Dao's long poem “Sidetracks” will be published next spring by New Directions, where he works as an editor. He also serves as a board member of the Howland Public Library.
“A Celebration of Multiverse: An Evening with Tzveta Sofronieva and Jeffrey Yang” is funded by the DAAD from funds of the German Federal Foreign Office (AA) and supported, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts. Special thanks for their organizational support to Dennis Maloney, the Publisher of White Pine Press, and Christopher Merrill, Director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.
Date and Time: Monday, October 23rd, 2023, from 6:00 PM-7:30 PM
Location: Deutsches Haus at NYU, 42 Washington Mews, New York, New York 10003