[VIRTUAL] AAWW Presents: Natural History + The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu with Jennifer Shyue, Michelle Har Kim, and Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda

This July, AAWW presents contemporary translators Jennifer Shyue and Michelle Har Kim in a conversation moderated by translator Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda, following their respective recent publications that bridge literary spheres and allow us access to the acclaimed works of two Peruvian writers.

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One of Peru’s most revered contemporary poets, José Watanabe’s poetry collection Natural History is a contribution to ongoing cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary conversations about language, nature, and Asian migration across the Americas. For the first time, it is available in a dual-language edition that features both Spanish and English in Michelle Har Kim’s translation.

Born to immigrants from Okinawa and raised in Lima’s working-class center, Augusto Higa Oshiro was a Peruvian writer and member of Peru’s Grupo Narración, a group of writers focused on realist, working-class fiction in the 1970s. His novella, The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu, is translated from Spanish by Jennifer Shyue and is his first book to be translated into English.

Jennifer Shyue is a translator from Spanish. Her work has appeared most recently in Lit Hub, Oversound, and Poetry Daily and has received support from Cornell University’s Institute for Comparative Modernities, the Fulbright Program, the National Endowment for the Arts, Princeton University, and the University of Iowa. Her translations include Julia Wong Kcomt’s chapbook Vice-royal-ties (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021) and Augusto Higa Oshiro’s novel The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu (Archipelago Books, 2023).

Michelle Har Kim is an editor and indexer of academic manuscripts, and a previous NEA Translation Fellow. Her translations of José Watanabe’s poems appear in Guernica, Shenandoah, Epiphany, and the Asian American Literary Review. Michelle was born and raised in Manhattan.

Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda is a Japanese to English literary translator based in New York City. Born in Tokyo, raised in Texas, she received her B.A. from Wesleyan University and her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. Her work has appeared in LitHub, Guernica, and The Baffler among other places. With Allison Markin Powell, she is the co-translator of Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s KAPPA (New Directions, 2023).

[VIRTUAL] AAWW Presents: Natural History + The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu with Jennifer Shyue, Michelle Har Kim, and Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda

Thursday, July 20, 2023
7:00 PM
$0.00

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