Translating Punctuation Workshop and Zine-Making with Adriana X. Jacobs and Georgie Fooks

6 June 15:00 to 18:00
Seminar Room 8, St Anne's College

Adriana X. Jacobs, University of Oxford          Georgie Fooks, University of Oxford

Inspired by the Translating Punctuation roundtable at last year’s Oxford Translation Day, this workshop invites participants to consider the material conditions of translation and how they affect our understanding of punctuation.

The author Cristina Rivera Garza has described punctuation as “the breathing system of a text”. Punctuation, while a physically small intervention on the page, can influence the rhythm, tone, and mood of a text, posing intriguing challenges for translators. The same mark, transported across languages, can make a world of difference. And as a visual symbol, punctuation introduces a graphic element to the text, altering the space of the page and its design. The translation and zine-making workshop will bring together the visual and textual components of our translation practice. This workshop will be led by Adriana X. Jacobs and Georgie Fooks.

All languages are welcome. No prior literary translation experience required. Participants are encouraged to bring along texts with interesting approaches to punctuation. Materials for zine-making will be provided.

Register via Eventbrite, here. (max. 25 participants)

Adriana X. Jacobs is Associate Professor of Modern Hebrew Literature at the University of Oxford and author of Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry (University of Michigan Press, 2018). Her translations of contemporary Hebrew poetry include Vaan Nguyen’s The Truffle Eye (Zephyr Press, 2021), for which she was awarded the 2022 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Merav Givoni Hrushovski's End— (Carrion Bloom Books, 2023).

Georgie Fooks is a current DPhil student in Spanish at the University of Oxford, researching twentieth-century Argentine poetry and translation. As a writer and translator from Spanish, her work has been published in Asymptote, Hopscotch Translation, and The Oxonian Review. She is the Director of Outreach at Asymptote and has studied poetry translation at the BCLT Summer School.