10x10 Tour: Carcanet Press Classics Translation

Contact: jazmine@carcanet.co.uk

A carnival of authors, poets, translators and publishers, under the banner of BookBlast® writing agency will be travelling to major cities across England, showcasing some of the finest independent-spirited literature and poetry being published today.

We are visiting nine regions of England, celebrating risk-taking publishers who fill a unique niche in discovering talent. The tour will inspire readers to explore and discover what’s happening in different parts of the world now as audiences encounter writers from the Middle East, Europe, Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. With these events, BookBlast® aims to unite people in the spirit of friendship and exchange.

Thurs 8 Nov. Waterstones Manchester, Deansgate 6.30 p.m. Carcanet Press
Claiming the Great Tradition: Women Recalibrate the Classics

Please visit the Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/522707541490181

& book your tickets here: https://www.waterstones.com/events/the-bookblast-10x10-tour-carcanet-in-manchester/manchester-deansgate

Chaired by Michael Schmidt, publisher at Carcanet Press.

Jane Draycott, a tutor on postgraduate writing programmes at Oxford University and the University of Lancaster will discuss her translation of the 14th-century Pearl which is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and winner of a Stephen Spender Prize for Translation.

Jenny Lewis teaches poetry at Oxford University. She'll discuss Gilgamesh Retold, which won the Warden’s Prize at Goldsmiths as part of Jenny’s “Writing Mesopotamia” project and was shortlisted for a Gladstone’s Library Residency.

Pearl -
In a dream landscape radiant with jewels, a father sees his lost daughter on the far bank of a river: ‘my pearl, my girl’. One of the great treasures of the British Library, the fourteenth-century poem Pearl is a work of poetic brilliance; its account of loss and consolation has retained its force across six centuries. Jane Draycott in her new translation remakes the imaginative intensity of the original. This is, Bernard O’Donoghue says in his introduction, ‘an event of great significance and excitement’, an encounter between medieval tradition and an acclaimed modern poet.

Gilgamesh Retold -
Jenny Lewis relocates Gilgamesh to its earlier, oral roots in a Sumerian society where men and women were more equal, the reigning deity of Gilgamesh’s city, Uruk, was female (Inanna), only women were allowed to brew beer and keep taverns and women had their own language – emesal. With this shift of emphasis, Lewis captures the powerful allure of the world’s oldest poem and gives it a fresh dynamic while creating a fastpaced narrative for a new generation of readers.

Price: £3.00

Time: 6:30pm