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Slought Foundation is pleased to announce "Amores," a public conversation about translation with renowned author Paul Muldoon and Editor of the Cahiers Series Dan Gunn in the Slought Foundation galleries on Thursday, February 5, 2008 from 7:00-8:30pm. This program has been organized by Jean-Michel Rabaté and is made possible in part through the generous support of The Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania.
The Cahiers Series is published jointly by the Center for Writers &
Translators at the Arts Arena of The American University of Paris and by
Sylph Editions. The ambition of the series is to make available new
explorations in writing, in translating, and in the areas linking these two
activities.
 Click here to download Dan Gunn and Paul Muldoon's Visual Presentation (PDF; 37.4 mb)
OVID: AMORES 1.5
Translation by Paul Muldoon
It was already well into the afternoon on a day that was boiling hot
and I was lying on a couch in a half-slumber,
the shutter half-open, sunlight slanting through the slats
as it slants through a stand of timber,
so it might have seemed like a still-glowing gloam
or a dawn in which there’s still some murk–
the kind of light in which shy young things are at home
since it throws some semblance of modesty over their work.
Right on cue, Corinna appeared, her dress undone,
her hair piled up to show off a throat as creamy
as that of Semiramis, the Babylonian queen
arrayed for her bridal, or Lais of Corinth, who took on half an army.
I tore off that flimsy excuse for a dress
which she’d fought to keep on until
it was clear she really wanted me to press
my advantage. She’d been betrayed by her own weak will.
She stood before me without a stitch of clothes,
her body without the slightest blemish.
I saw, then touched, her shoulders and arms so smooth,
her nipples to which I would pay homage.
Below her breast lay her slender, flat mid-section.
The curve of her haunch. Her youthful thigh.
Must I list every feature? Each in the pink of perfection.
I held her naked body by-and-by.
The rest I’ll leave to your imagination. We’d soon be dog-tired, suffice to say,
dead to the world. If only more afternoons would turn out this way.
Paul Muldoon was born in 1951 in County Armagh, Northern Ireland. Since 1987 he has lived in the United States, where he is now Howard G. B. Clark '21 Professor at Princeton University and Chair of the Peter B. Lewis Center for the Arts. In 2007 he was appointed Poetry Editor of The New Yorker. Between 1999 and 2004 he was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, where he is an honorary Fellow of Hertford College. Paul Muldoon's main collections of poetry are New Weather (1973), Mules (1977), Why Brownlee Left (1980), Quoof (1983), Meeting The British (1987), Madoc: A Mystery (1990), The Annals of Chile (1994), Hay (1998), Poems 1968-1998 (2001) and Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), for which he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize. His tenth collection, Horse Latitudes, appeared in the fall of 2006. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Paul Muldoon was given an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature for 1996. He has been described by The Times Literary Supplement as "the most significant English-language poet born since the second World War."
Dan Gunn joined the faculty of the American University of Paris full-time in 1989 after four years of teaching at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. From January 2007 he has been Director of the Center for Writers & Translators at the American University, and Series Editor of the Cahiers Series. He regularly reviews works of fiction and texts on literary theory for the Times Literary Supplement. Beneficiary of a Florence Gould award, he is the Paris Director of the Correspondence of Samuel Beckett, an international project based in Emory University, whose aim is the publication of a selection of Beckett’s voluminous correspondence. Gunn has research interests principally in twentieth-century European literature, fiction especially, and has specialized in the work of Marcel Proust and Samuel Beckett.
This program was made possible in part through the generous sponsorship of the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania and the Society of Friends of Slought Foundation.
Media files on the Slought.org website are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
MLA Style:
Paul Muldoon, et al. "Amores: Paul Muldoon and Dan Gunn on Translation." Slought Foundation Online Content. [05 February 2009;
Accessed 18 March 2010]. <http://slought.org/content/11416/>.
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