Christina Huemer Lecture

Partecipate insieme a noi alla conversazione fra tre amici – colleghi scrittori e compagni – su cosa significhi tradurre libri, individui ed esistenze.

Born in Rome in 1975, Andrea Bajani (2017 Italian Fellow) is one of the most respected and award-winning novelists and poets of contemporary Italian literature. He is the author of four novels and three collections of poems. His novel Se consideri le colpe (If You Kept a Record of Sins), published in the United States by Archipelago and translated by Elizabeth Harris, has brought him a great deal of attention. In just a few months, the book won the Super Mondello Prize, the Brancati Prize, the Recanati Prize, and the Lo Straniero Prize. Bajani’s latest novel, Il libro delle Case (The Book of Homes), was finalist for the Premio Strega and the Premio Campiello and is being translated in twenty countries. It will be published in the US by Deep Vellum. He is currently Distinguished Writer in Residence at Rice University in Houston, Texas.

Jhumpa Lahiri (2013 Resident), a bilingual writer and translator, is the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Barnard College, Columbia University. She received the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for Interpreter of Maladies, her debut story collection. She is also the author of The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, and The Lowland, which was a finalist for both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award in fiction. Since 2015, Lahiri has been writing fiction, essays, and poetry in Italian: In Altre Parole (In Other Words), Il vestito dei libri (The Clothing of Books), Dove mi trovo (self-translated as Whereabouts), Il quaderno di Nerina, and Racconti romani. She has translated three novels by Domenico Starnone and is the editor of The Penguin Classics Book of Italian Short Stories, which was published in Italy as Racconti italiani. Lahiri received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2014, and in 2019 she was named Commendatore of the Italian Republic by President Sergio Mattarella. Her most recent book in English, Translating Myself and Others, was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Roman Stories, partly translated by the author, will be published in fall 2023.

Michael F. Moore has recently completed a multiyear project of translating the great Italian novel, The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni (New York: Modern Library, 2022), into American English. His published translations range across genres, from modern classics to contemporary fiction and nonfiction, including, most recently: The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi; Agostino by Alberto Moravia; Quiet Chaos by Sandro Veronesi; and Live Bait by Fabio Genovesi. Moore is currently working on a new translation of Moravia’s short-story collection, Rome Tales. For many years he served as the chair of the PEN Translation Committee and, subsequently, as the chair of the advisory board of the PEN/Heim Translation Grant. He was also the staff interpreter and translator of the Italian Mission to the United Nations. Recognition of his work includes an NEA Translation Grant, the first translator in residence at Princeton University, and a fellowship at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Italy. Moore has conducted literary translation workshops at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and at Literature House Ireland, as well as courses in Italian language and literature at Bard College, Hunter College, and New York University. He received his PhD in Italian studies from New York University, with a thesis on Petrarch commentaries in the fifteenth century.

La conversazione si terrà in inglese.

All’evento, gratuito, aperto al pubblico e presentato dal vivo in Accademia si potrà partecipare anche su Zoom registrandosi con anticipo. In seguito alla registrazione verrà inviata un’e-mail di conferma contenente informazioni sulla partecipazione al webinar.

L’evento è realizzato con la collaborazione di Maria Ida Gaeta.

Conferenza intitolata a Christina Huemer

Christina Huemer, prima bibliotecaria Drue Heinz dell’Accademia (1992–2007), ha profuso grande impegno nei confronti dei numerosi borsisti, residenti e lettori della Biblioteca Arthur e Janet C. Ross dell’Accademia. La serie di conferenze intitolate alla bibliotecaria è stata istituita da C. Brian Rose (borsista nel 1992, Residente nel 2012 e membro Emerito del Consiglio di Amministrazione dell’Accademia) per celebrare la dedizione di Christina Huemer alla cultura e alla creatività.

Avviso

Si ricorda che zaini e bagagli di dimensioni superiori a 40 x 35 x 15 cm (16 x 14 x 6 in.) non sono ammessi all’interno dell’Academy. Non sono disponibili armadietti per il deposito di borse e bagagli.

This event is part of the series New Work in the Arts & Humanities: The Body.

The American Academy in Rome opens its 2018–19 programming season with a lecture by Mary Beard, a renowned scholar of antiquity and a writer and blogger on women in society today. She will explore the idea of the human body in classical sculpture: female and male, normative and conservative, subversive and transgressive. Beard’s lecture will aim to pull apart the image of the body in classical sculpture as a dead weight on our imagination, and to follow the edgy awkwardness that the work of the Greeks and Romans bravely faced. Her topics will range from Praxiteles to Jenny Saville, from Kenneth Clark to twenty-first-century feminism.

Beard’s lecture inaugurates a thematic series of events organized in 2018–19 on “The Body,” which will consider the body—by way of past artifact and present reality—as a site of subjectivity and meaning in the arts and humanities today.

Beard is professor of classics at Newnham College, University of Cambridge. She is the author of eighteen books on society and culture in the ancient world, including The Parthenon (2002), The Roman Triumph (2007), and Women and Power: A Manifesto (2017). Since 1992 she has been the classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement, which also hosts her blog, A Don’s Life. Beard is the 2019 Lucy Shoe Meritt Resident in Classical Studies and Archaeology at the American Academy in Rome.

The event will be held in English. Watch it at https://livestream.com/aarome.

Christina Huemer Lecture

Christina Huemer was the Academy’s first Drue Heinz Librarian (1992–2007) and deeply committed to the many Academy Fellows, Residents, and readers in the Arthur and Janet C. Ross Library. The Christina Huemer Lecture Series was established by Academy Trustee C. Brian Rose in celebration of her devotion to great scholarship and creativity.

Thornton Wilder’s eight months at the American Academy in Rome during 1920 and 1921—where he studied Latin, Italian, and archaeology, interacted with distinguished faculty, and formed a long-lasting friendship with Lauro de Bosis and his family—imprinted classical literature, Italian culture, and archeological metaphors on his creativity. De Bosis’s example as a poet, dramatist, translator, and Hellenist, and his invitation to Thornton to participate in a Plato reading group, strengthened Wilder’s engagement with ancient Greek literature.

Wilder’s fellow students and professors—including Elizabeth Hazelton Haight, Harry Leon, Ralph Van Deman Magoffin, and Walton Brooks McDaniel—bestowed on him a broad Greco-Roman perspective on the classical past, with detailed attention to the private life of the ancients and the role of women. His AAR experience resulted in novels and plays marked by multiple literary and cultural influences that are subtle, intricate, multilayered, often indirect, and integrated with multiple ancient Greek and Roman sources.

Judith P. Hallett is professor emerita of classics at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Stephen Rojcewicz is an independent scholar. Tappan Wilder, nephew of Thornton Wilder, and Alessandro Cortese De Bosis, nephew of Lauro De Bosis, will speak at the end of the presentations.

This lecture, to be presented on Zoom, is free and open to the public. The start time is 6:00pm Central European Time (12:00 noon Eastern Time).

Christina Huemer Lecture

Christina Huemer was the Academy’s first Drue Heinz Librarian (1992–2007) and deeply committed to the many Academy Fellows, Residents, and readers in the Arthur and Janet C. Ross Library. The Christina Huemer Lecture Series was established by Academy Trustee C. Brian Rose in celebration of her devotion to great scholarship and creativity.