Circling Translation

The rough kingdom. I’ve been through it.
The good sky moved me. I come with it.
Here I am now, telling you about it.

from Circling Dante (Kimberly Campanello)

Questo regno crudele. Ci sono passata. 
Il buon cielo mi ha spinta. E io ne sono parte.
Eccomi qui, ora, che te lo racconto. 

(trans. Nicoletta Asciuto)

What happens when we translate poetry? What decisions and negotiations do we make as translators and readers? How does translation affect one’s own writing? And what happens to poetry that gets translated again and again - sometimes even back to its original language? Join us for an evening celebrating translation in all its forms, with Kimberly Campanello, Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds, award-winning poet, and currently translator of a new version of Dante’s Commedia that is at once highly personal and ‘universal’, in conversation with her translator, Nicoletta Asciuto. During this event, both Campanello and Asciuto will be sharing examples and talking about their personal approaches to translating poetry (Dante, Mirrlees, and Campanello). 

Kimberly Campanello’s recent projects are MOTHERBABYHOME, a 796-page visual poetry-object and reader’s edition book (zimZalla, 2019), and sorry that you were not moved (2022), an interactive digital poetry publication (with Christodoulos Makris and Fallow Media) in conversation with Calvino's Invisible Cities. Her next poetry collection An Interesting Detail is forthcoming from Bloomsbury Poetry in Spring 2025 and is being translated into Italian by Nicoletta Asciuto (University of York).

Her work on Dante has been supported by the William and Katherine Devers Program for Dante Studies at the University of Notre Dame. She is Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds.

Nicoletta Asciuto is Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature at the University of York and is an emerging literary translator. Her most recent translations have appeared in Early Radio: An Anthology of European Texts and Translations (Edinburgh UP 2023). Her Italian translation of Hope Mirrlees’s Paris. A Poem (1920), the first translation of Mirrlees’s work into Italian, is forthcoming in 2025 with Interno Poesia. Her academic monograph, Brilliant Modernism: Cultures of Light and Modernist Poetry, is also forthcoming in 2025 with Johns Hopkins UP.