O Miami Poetry Festival | Sorbos de Luz: A Translation Workshop

With principal funding provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the goal of the annual O, Miami Poetry Festival is for every single person in Miami-Dade County to encounter a poem.

Each festival begins on April 1 and ends on April 30. Mixing site-specific events, community gatherings, and poetry-in-public-places projects, the festival strives to be a celebration of Miami and its people.
 

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This 90-minute workshop invites Spanish speakers to translate short poems written by Cuban poet Juana Rosa Pita and works of their own. Translator Erin Goodman guides participants through key elements of the craft and practice of literary translation. Next, we introduce poet Juana Rosa Pita’s Sorbos de Luz / Sips of Light: which are three-line poems/aphorisms. This workshop creates an open space for Bilingual speakers to try out translation using the short poetic format and work on their own or in pairs to translate some of Juana Rosa Pita's Sips of Light.
 

Erin Goodman (she/her) is a Spanish / English translator working across disciplines with a focus on arts, humanities, and social sciences. She recently translated a collection of poetry by Juana Rosa Pita (b. 1939, Havana), called The Miracle Unfolds. Erin has been a frequent translator for The New York Times Opinion Section, founder of a Cuba-focused travel company, lead editor of the Writers Program at Startup Cuba, and her creative translations have been featured in several literary journals. Erin learned Spanish in high school living in Chile, and became a translator in her 30s, earning a Certificate in English–Spanish translation from the University of Massachusetts-Boston. By day she works at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University.