Jeffrey Angles is an American poet, translator, and professor of Japanese literature at Western Michigan University. During his visit to The University of Queensland, Professor Angles delivered a public lecture titled 'Promiscuous Reading - Living and Loving between Languages'.
Abstract
In The Happy Life published in 1896, Charles W. Eliot wrote, “Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.” But can’t books be lovers as well? In this presentation, Professor Jeffrey Angles, who teaches Japanese literature at Western Michigan University, will talk about his own experiences, first as a literary scholar and translator, then later as a poet, taking books as friends, counselors, teachers, and lovers. He will discuss the motivations behind his own award-winning translations, including Forest of Eyes: Selected Poems of Tada Chimako and The Book of the Dead by Orikuchi Shinobu, and he will also talk about the ways that his experiences as a translator inspired his own collection of Japanese-language poetry Watashi no hizukehenkōsen (My International Date Line), which won one of Japan’s most prestigious prizes for literature in 2017.
Presenter
Jeffrey Angles is an American poet, translator, and professor of Japanese literature at Western Michigan University. His collection of original Japanese-language poetry Watashi no hizukehenkōsen (My International Date Line, 2016),won the Yomiuri Prize for Literature, making him the first non-native to win this highly coveted prize for poetry since the award began in 1949. His work as a scholar of modern Japanese literature and cultural history is visible in numerous publications, including the books Writing the Love of Boys (2011) and These Things Here and Now: Poetic Responses to the March 11, 2011 Disasters (2016). In addition, he has earned numerous prizes for his translations of modern Japanese literature, and poetry in particular. His most recent translation of the modernist novel The Book of the Dead by Orikuchi Shinobu won both the Scaglione Translation Award from the Modern Language Association and the Miyoshi Translation Award from the Donald Keene Center for Japanese Studies. He believes strongly in the role of translators as activists, and much of his career has focused on the translation into English of socially engaged, feminist, or queer writers.
