Join New York Times bestselling author Ilan Stavans and the Chocolate Church Art Center's own Executive & Artistic Director Matthew Glassman for a conversation about Stavans’ new book Fictional Translations and more. Conversation will touch on translation, mythology, and the truths that can only be accessed through fabulation. At a juncture of history defined by automation and artifice, what is the role of poetic imagination? What does the writing of Jorge Luis Borges and other mystical tricksters have to offer our current moment? Join two long time friends and collaborators as they consider these questions and others!

Ilan Stavans is the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College, the publisher of Restless Books, and a consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary. He is a New York Times bestselling author and the recipient of numerous international awards. His work, translated into twenty languages, has been adapted into film, TV, radio, and theater.

The culmination of New York Times bestselling author Ilan Stavans’s distinguished career as a scholar and translator, his book Fictional Translations pushes the boundaries of poetry. This extraordinarily original volume includes apocryphal poems by Petrarch, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Anna Akhmatova, Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Celan, Fernando Pessoa, Jorge Luis Borges, Eugenio Montale, Pablo Neruda, Yehuda Amichai, and scores of others in their original languages, as well as English translations of those poems by invented translators whose approaches to the craft often clash. Each translator also explains, in personal reflections, their fears and dreams, their aesthetics, and the challenges of remaining “invisible.”

With astonishing élan, Stavans, known for his polyglot explorations, invites us to see language anew and liberate the alternative voices that exist within us.