Welcome! We are glad you have joined us. Translations 2010 was conceived as a means to provide the experience of diversity from an international perspective to our student body and local community. As members of a pedagogical institution we are dedicated to the act of cultivating understanding across cultures, and here, at the languages departments, we recognize poetry as a particular sensitive register for cultural transmission and translation as a vehicle for cross-cultural dialogue.

The festival was the culmination of months of planning. Faculty from various disciplines integrated the poets’ works into their syllabus, preparing the students for a direct intellectual exchange with the poets. The languages faculty designed courses and activities that engaged students in the act of translation. Once the poets arrived they visited classrooms and worked closely with students and faculty in order to have the best rendering of their work projected in the background as they performed their work in the original language. Throughout the festival the poets’ geo-cultural locations were an important topic of conversation, and an integral part of conceptualizing difference using spatial and temporal coordinates. The festival art and the poets’ virtual global trajectory prepared beforehand by the design team, contributed to the audience’s perceptivity during the poets’ performances. It allowed the listener to contextualize the poets’ efforts in order to arrive at their present poetic vision, as well as to Lewiston, Maine. The result was an interactive event with pedagogical resonance.

We thank the poets that participated this year, and the faculty and students whose translation acts opened the event to the wider community. We also acknowledge and are grateful for the contributions that made this event possible. We encourage you to peruse our credits page in order to get an idea of the scope of this project. Please, check back with us often as we continue to add to our site!