This bilingual edition makes Juan Gelman’s hauntingly beautiful exilic poetry collection, Notes (Notas), available to English-speaking audiences in its entirety for the first time. With a deep appreciation for Gelman’s masterful language play, Afsari and Tandeciarz channel not only the force of his poetic testimony against the real violence of Argentina’s military dictatorship, but also his lyrical conjuring of the possible. In this climate of flame and fury that is also the climate of Gelman’s poetry, conventions wear out, binaries rupture, and language begs for its radical reinvention. Interweaving reflections on revolution, loss and memory, Argentina’s poet laureate conjures forth a sense of hope in the wake of inconceivable suffering. Reflecting on the labor of translation, Afsari and Tandeciarz will present selected poems in both Spanish and English.
Arianna Afsari is a translator and doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. She examines twentieth-century Latin American guerilla poetry alongside traditions of Persian militant poetics deployed as tools of anticolonial resistance. Her work and translations of the Argentine poet, Juan Gelman, have been published in Absinthe: World Literature in Translation (2023) and LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory (2025).
Silvia R. Tandeciarz is Chancellor Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures and Vice Dean for Social Sciences and Interdisciplinary Studies at William & Mary, where she has worked since 1999. A translator, poet, and scholar in the field of Latin American Cultural Studies, she has published widely on the intersections between memorial and human rights initiatives in post-dictatorship Argentina. Her work in translation includes the critical treatises Masculine/Feminine (Duke University Press, 2004) and The Insubordination of Signs (Duke University Press, 2004), both by the Chilean theorist Nelly Richard, and the Poetry Book Society 2023 Translation Choice selection, Sea in my bones (the87press), by Puerto Rican poet Juana Goergen.
20260729T154520260729T1715America/Argentina/Buenos_AiresBOOK PRESENTATION: Afsari and Tandeciarz Present a New Bilingual Edition of Juan Gelman's Notes (Notas)SVE2MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
