Join poet and translator Leo Boix for a pair of online workshops looking at Queer Spanish language poetry. On Monday the 17th Buenos Aires based translator Paula Galindez will lead a workshop translating Scottish poet Jackie Kay into Spanish. The next day Jon Herring will lead a session translating Argentinian poet Osvaldo Bossi into English.

These workshops will take place over Zoom and will see the participants come together and work with the guest translators and our poet facilitator, Leo Boix to make translations that work as living poems in the target languages. Everyone works together to unpick the poems, working from a literal or rough translation provided by the translator. It is a great way to deepen your love and appreciation for language, poetry and other cultures.

Paula Galindez's session, translating Jackie Kay into Spanish, is the first time the PTC has translated out of English and into another language.

Are you a Spanish speaker? These workshops will both deal with Spanish poetry, including translating into Spanish, so having some faculty with the Spanish language is advised.

Poets

Jackie Kay is an award-winning Scottish poet, playwright, and novelist, known for her works Other Lovers (1993), Trumpet (1998) and Bantam (2017). Her work often deals with identity, race, nationality, gender, and sexuality. From 2016 to 2021 Jackie Kay was the Makar, the poet laureate of Scotland and she Served as the Chancellor of the University of Salford between 2015 and 2022.

Osvaldo Bossi was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1960. He is a poet and writer who has been widely anthologised in Argentina and Latin America. His first collection Tres was published in 1997. This was followed by The ice cream boy and other poems (Under the moon, 2006), From the Coyote to the roadrunner (Huesos de Jibia, 2007; Editorial Folía 2010) and a personal anthology entitled House of wind (Nudista, 2011). He also organises cycles of readings at The Green Ray, in his home town.

Translators

Paula Galindez is a poet, translator and translation professor born in Argentina. She earned a BA in Literary and Audiovisual Translation in English and has translated books from English and German into Spanish, and from Spanish into English. She has studied creative writing and translation with renowned Argentine writers such as Alberto Muñoz, Andi Nachon, and Pablo Ingberg.

Paula Galindez says: "Being selected for the Queer Digital Residency is one of the most exciting things that has happened to me... It really doesn't get any better than this."

Jon Herring is a linguist and early career translator who lives in London. His undergraduate degree was in Spanish and French literature. He lectured in linguistics at Oxford and Sussex, and undertook research projects on the spelling systems of Romance and Germanic languages, theories of language mixing among Spanish-English bilingual communities in Miami.

Jon Herring says: "I am extremely excited to be working with the team at the PTC, my Argentinian counterpart Paula... It’s a dream come true."

Poet facilitator

Leo Boix is a Latino British poet, translator and journalist based in the UK. He has published two collections in Spanish, Un lugarpropio (2015) and Mar de noche (2017), and was included in many anthologies, such as Ten: Poets of the New Generation (Bloodaxe) and Why Poetry? (Verve Poetry Press).

Queer Digital Residency

These two workshops are part of the PTC and Universidad de San Andrés' Queer Digital Residency: a seven-month development program for two emerging Queer identifying translators, aimed at elevating and strengthening their translation practices and giving them time, money and resources to translate queer poets.

The Queer Digital Residency programme is supported by funding from Oxford Brooks University and the Fondation Jan Michalski.