NOTIS Lecture: On The Translation Of Poetry by Alexis Levitin

Folio: The Seattle Athenaeum and The Northwest Literary Translators invite you to join us for an in-person lecture and discussion led by noted translator Alexis Levitin.

Visiting as part of his West Coast tour, Alexis will focus on strategies for translating rhymed poetry from "rhyme-rich" languages like Spanish and Portuguese into a "rhyme-poor" language like English. He will discuss some highlights of his own long career in translation, including a rhymed sonnet by Ecuador's Sonia Manzano, a rhymed poem of four quatrains by Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, and one 2025 publication, Leonor Scliear-Cabral's set of 23 sonnets dedicated to letters of the Hebrew alphabet, called "Consecration of the Aleph Bet" in Alexis's translation. He will also discuss the stories behind his discovery of those works and their eventual publication in translation.

Alexis Levitin is a widely-published translator and an author of short stories, as well as a beloved fixture of ALTA conferences, where…