In the Glittering Maw
Surrealist poetry with C. Francis Fisher and friends
Sunday, September 15, 4pm (doors open at 3:30pm)
In partnership with the Center for the Art of Translation
Cushion Works is pleased to welcome C. Francis Fisher, who reads from her translation of In the Glittering Maw, the first English-language collection focused on the later works of Arab-Jewish Surrealist poet Joyce Mansour. Additionally, Daniel Owen reads his translations of contemporary Indonesian poet Afrizal Malna and Olivia Sears reads her translations of Italian futurist Ardengo Soffici.
Born in England to Syrian-Jewish parents, Joyce Mansour (1928–1986) was raised in Cairo, where she first came in contact with Parisian surrealism. She was exiled to Paris in 1953 and published her first poetry collection that same year. Mansour wrote 16 books of poetry, as well as prose works and plays, and became a key member of the postwar Surrealist milieu.
Mansour’s late poems chart constellations of desire, femininity, and dream. Considered by Andre Bréton to be the preeminent Surrealist of the period, Mansour brings this masculine movement into an unchartered feminine realm. She insists on a forgotten or denied eventuality of women’s equality: their ability to do harm, to be violent: “Why tear fire from the impalpable sky / When it already grows and smolders in me / Why throw your glove into the crowd / Tomorrow is a livid stump.”
In the Glittering Maw, poet C. Francis Fisher’s first published translation, is lauded by author and translator Mark Polizotti for “giving fresh voice to a fierce, passionate, sensuous, scandalous cry that has strained to be heard in the Anglophone world for over half a century.” Wayne Koestenbaum notes “Fisher’s sinewy and imaginative translation” of “this most corporeal and threshold-traversing poet, who seems, like Louise Bourgeois, to be the apostle of fleshly metamorphosis.”
C. Francis Fisher received her MFA in poetry from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, The Yale Review, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. She has been supported by fellowships from Bread Loaf and the Vermont Studio Center. She curates Colloquy, an event series that provides a forum for translators to engage with live audiences in an exploration of the art of translation.
Daniel Owen is a poet, editor, and translator between Indonesian and English. Recent publications include a revised translation of Afrizal Malna’s Document Shredding Museum (World Poetry Books, 2024). Daniel edits and designs books and participates in many processes of the Ugly Duckling Presse editorial collective and is a PhD candidate in the Department of South & Southeast Asian Studies at UC Berkeley.
Olivia E. Sears is the founder of the Center for the Art of Translation and served as editor of Two Lines Press for twelve years. She is a translator from Italian.
This event is free.