Spanish Translator & Author Jeff Diteman

Spanish Translator & Author Jeff Diteman will read from his work.

[From Sam Lohmann’s local events mailing list via Passages Bookshop / Spare Room Reading Series:]

Jeff Diteman will read from his translation of the novel The Anarchist Who Shared My Name by Oulipo Member Pablo Martín Sánchez.

Diteman will discuss the history of constraint-based literature and its complex relationship with politics and philosophy, referencing works by Oulipians Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, Anne Garréta, and Michèle Audin.

Jeff is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, specializing in Latin American and francophone literature. His work has been published by Drunken Boat, Nailed Magazine, Inventory, Jacobin, McSweeney’s, and Deep Vellum.

Lena Walker will present her translations of Russian poetry, including poems written in a Soviet prison by Yuli Daniel, a song by the dissident Vladimir Vissotsky, poetry of exile by Marina Tsvetaeva, as well as work by Anna Akhmatova and Pushkin. Lena is a general worker and sometimes art maker in Portland, Oregon. She has a BA in Russian from Portland State, where she studied language, literature, and poetry. She is currently working on a Master of Urban and Regional Planning and would like to make useful things out of your garbage.

Sam Lohmann will offer his original constraint-based poetry as well as work by Georges Perec and Jackson Mac Low. Sam lives in Vancouver, Washington and works as an academic librarian. He is a co-organizer of the long-running Spare Room reading series in Portland. His new chapbook of short prose, In a Saint’s Ashtray, is forthcoming this fall from The Magnificent Field press.