First English Translation of Glissant Poetry Celebrated with Concert and Readings

Readings and music celebrating the first English translation of revered Francophone writer Edouard Glissant’s complete poetic works will be presented on April 28 at the CUNY Graduate Center, where Glissant is a Distinguished Professor of French.  The event will be held in the Elebash Recital Hall at The Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue/34th Street. The program will begin at 7 p.m., and is free and open to the public.
 

Bernard Lubat and Jayne Cortez will perform in concert, along with readings of poems. Lubat is a premier French jazz composer and Cortez is a poet and jazz performer. Glissant’s complete poetic oeuvre was translated into English by Jeff Humphries and published in 2005 by the University of Minnesota press.

Born in Martinique in 1928, educated in Paris, and a frequent traveler throughout Europe and the Americas, Glissant is considered Aone of the greatest writers and thinkers of the last part of the twentieth century@ (Encyclopedia Universalis). His expansive theories of creolization have much to say about an evolving global culture, as well as his native Caribbean.

After an education at the Sorbonne, Glissant was a member of the activist writing culture in Paris in the 1950s and 60s. He supported the Algerian and Caribbean independence movements, and he was involved in movements like the Black African Renaissance in post-WWII Europe, though he decries art as political propaganda. His work appeared in the early editions of the literary journal Presence Africane, and he was one of the first organizers and speakers at the First Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris 1956, and again in Rome, in 1959.

He emigrated to the United States and chaired the Centre for French and Francophone Studies at Louisiana State University, where he was named a Distinguished University Professor in 1989. In 1995 Glissant was appointed to his current position as Distinguished Professor of French at The Graduate Center, City University of New York.

The event is sponsored by the Graduate Center’s Ph.D. Program in French, the AFAA, the Henri Peyre French Institute, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, and the Department of Romance Languages at Hunter College.


The Graduate Center is the doctorate-granting institution of The City University of New York.  The only consortium of its kind in the nation, the school draws its faculty of more than 1,700 members mainly from the CUNY senior colleges.

Established in 1961, The Graduate Center has grown to an enrollment of about 4,000 students in more than 30 doctoral programs and six master's degree programs in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences.  The Graduate Center also houses 28 research centers and institutes, administers the CUNY Baccalaureate Program as well as a number of other university-wide academic programs, and offers a wide range of intellectual and cultural programs of interest to the general public.

Further information on The Graduate Center's programs and activities can be found on its website at: www.gc.cuny.edu.