Sam Reichman is a writer, translator, and visual artist. Sam was born and raised in Kansas City, Kansas in the United States. He moved to New York City for university, receiving his B.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from Columbia University and his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Hunter College. Sam also studied drawing and painting at The Art Students League of New York. Sam’s writing, translations, and visual art have appeared in Washington Square Review, Cagibi, Headland, and elsewhere. Sam is currently living in Te Whanga-nui-a-Tara, where he is pursuing a PhD in Literary Translation Studies at Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington.
Session 1
Translation and Translanguaging
In this presentation, I’ll be discussing how I’ve used translanguaging, or combining multiple languages in one text, to respond to the poetry of Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb (1925 – 1964), one of the most important Arabic-language poets of the 20th century. I will share examples from my thesis, in which I am translating al-Sayyāb’s work into a combination of English, te reo Māori, Biblical (and some Rabbinic) Hebrew, and Classical and Modern Standard Arabic; writing original poems which also use these languages in response to al-Sayyāb’s poems; and illustrating my translations of al-Sayyāb’s work.