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Kristin Dykstra | 'Things that Function Like Truth': Translating Contemporary Poetry from Latin America

by Program in Translation and Intercultural Communications

Lecture Communication Skills Global/Intercultural Humanities Social Sciences

Mon, Dec 1, 2025

12 PM – 1:20 PM EST (GMT-5)

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Louis A. Simpson International Building, Room 144

Princeton, NJ 08544, United States

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Flyer for Kristin Dykstra vertical bar ’Things that Function Like Truth’: Translating Contemporary Poetry from Latin America
Contemporary branding activity driven by the tourism industry, scholars find, affects perceptions of cities and nations around the globe. Branding practices actively message the public with images of what places “are like” and may even suggest how things “should be.” Literature has long been a space for contesting perceived truths about other places and times — and, just as important, about the self perceiving them too.

What can we learn from a sustained cross-cultural engagement with poetry? This genre may deploy language validating unanswered questions or resisting formulations associated with convenience, efficiency, profit, standardization; it may attempt to capture something of the interior life unseen through other forms of language. This talk incorporates short readings to explore how the questioning or construction of truths surfaces in recent translation projects.
Food Provided (Lunch available while supplies last.)

Where

Louis A. Simpson International Building, Room 144

Princeton, NJ 08544, United States

Speakers

Kristin Dykstra's profile photo

Kristin Dykstra

Distinguished Scholar in Residence & Director of First Year Seminar

Saint Michael's College

Kristin Dykstra is a writer, literary translator, and scholar. Her awards include the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Literary Translation, and the Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize, among others. Dykstra is the author of the prose poetry collection, Dissonance (The University of Chicago Press, 2025). Her latest translation, The Star-Spangled Brand by Marcelo Morales, appeared in January 2025, following the late 2024 release of Jigs and Lures, by Reina María Rodríguez. Previously Dykstra translated books from the Spanish by Amanda Berenguer, Juan Carlos Flores, Rito Ramón Aroche, Ángel Escobar, Omar Pérez, and Tina Escaja, as well as additional works by Morales and Rodríguez. Dykstra’s most recent scholarly chapter, examining Cuban poetry 1959–1989, appears in The Cambridge History of Cuban Literature (eds. Vicky Unruh and Jacqueline Loss, 2024).


Hosted By

Program in Translation and Intercultural Communications | View More Events
Co-hosted with: Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies, Anthropology Department, Program in Latin American Studies, Latino Princetonians

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