Marguerite feitlowitz bennington
•
This interview was written by Caridad Svich, and published originally in the Contemporary Theatre Review.
Over twenty years Marguerite Feitlowitz has distinguished herself as one of the US’s most passionate translators of theatrical texts from the Americas. She is also one of an esteemed handful of activist-authors reporting with depth and conviction on dissension and its role in the cultural and civic dialogue nationally and internationally. Her acclaimed work A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture (Oxford University Press, 1998) was named a New York Times Notable Book of 1998 and a Finalist for the PEN New England/ L.L. Winship Prize. It was based on six years of primary research with survivors of the ‘Dirty War’ concentration camps, relatives of desaparecidos, and human rights activists, and it is a significant literary as well as political achievement in the field of arts and letters. I first encoun
•
Reading, writing, and translating have always been fluid in my work and life. Translation projects have led to primary research and original books; my own writing has created affinity with authors whose work I have been drawn to translate. My work has always been concerned with how collective disaster, and the memory of disaster, affects our relationship to language: to narrative form, the making of images, the rhetorical framing of theater. I am drawn to writers whose response to repression and trauma is to radically remake form and genre, to refuse received notions of meaning and convention, and to expose not just the imposition of terror, but also the ways terror gets internalized and passed on, even in times of apparent security. Sustained immersion in testimony, setting, and history has been essential to all of my projects. Since 2002, I’ve taught literature and literary translation at Bennington College.
I came to this project through serendipity in December 2016, when having
•
Marguerite Feitlowitz is on the Literature Faculty at Bennington College. Author of the internationally acclaimed A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture, she translates poetry, theatre, and prose from Spanish and French. She edited and translated Information for Foreigners: Three Plays by Griselda Gambaro (Northwestern University Press) as well as Gambaro’s La Malasangre: BAD BLOOD and Strip. She also translated a collection of plays bygd Liliane Atlan, including Mister Fugue, included in Plays of the Holocaust (Elinor Fuchs, ed., Theatre Communications Group). Her most recent translations are stories bygd Luisa Valenzuela, published bygd InTranslation@BrooklynRail, The Sonora Review, REVIEW 88 Latin American Literature and Arts, and Gobshite Quarterly; and eleven poems from Liliane Atlan’s sista collection, also at InTranslation@BrooklynRail. Pushcart Pr