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St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Lee Enterprises

Monday, October 20, 2008 10:26 PM CDT
Literary events planned at U of I

CHAMPAIGN — Pulitzer Prize-winning poet W.S. Merwin and three-term U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky will visit the University of Illinois campus on Oct. 28 in conjunction with the conference “Translating the Middle Ages.”

The conference, free and open to the public, will take place Oct. 28-29 in Room 210 of the Illini Union, 1401 W. Green St., Urbana. Sponsored by the U. of I.’s Program in Medieval Studies and the Center for Translation Studies, the conference will feature medievalists from throughout North America and Europe.

A pre-conference “Dante Marathon” is set for Thursday. The event, scheduled to begin at 9 a.m. just outside the Foreign Languages Building, 707 S. Mathews Ave., Urbana, will feature a collective public reading of “Inferno,” the first canticle of Dante Alighieri’s “Divine Comedy.” In case of rain, the marathon will be moved inside to the Lucy Ellis Lounge.

Event organizer Eleonora Stoppino, a U. of I. professor of Italian who teaches a course on “Divine Comedy,” said students, faculty members and community members will take turns reading — in several different languages — the 34 cantos that make up “Inferno.”

Participants in the “Translating the Middle Ages” conference will include medievalists who work in various disciplines — from literature and language to history and art history — and in national traditions from Scandinavia to Greece, focusing on the movement among vernacular languages Arab and Latin. Twenty-two distinguished scholars are scheduled to read original papers during the conference.

Merwin and Pinsky will read from and discuss their translations of “Divine Comedy” during a CultureTalk event at the Colwell Playhouse in the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, beginning at 7:30 p.m. Oct. 28. The conversation will be moderated by author Richard Powers, the Swanlund Chair in English at Illinois who won a National Book Award in 2006 and received a Pulitzer Prize nomination in 2007 for his book “The Echo Maker.”

Tickets for the CultureTalk event are free but are no longer available. Persons interested in attending may submit a request to Krannert Center’s online wait list.

To inquire about ticket availability, call the arts center at 333-6280 or 1-800-527-2849.

An exhibit of Merwin’s papers titled “Multiple Merwins: Poet, Translator and Environmental Activist” is on view in the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Room 346 Library, 149 Gregory Drive, Urbana. The poet will make informal remarks at a reception in the library from 1 to 2 p.m. Oct. 28. The event is free and open to the public.

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