Translations, Perversions, Appropriations & Inventions

Translations, Perversions, Appropriations & Inventions

a reading by Trevor Joyce

Irish Writers’ Centre, 19 Parnell Square, Dublin 1. 

7.30 pm – admission free – all welcome

To mark International Translation Day 2011, the Irish Translators’ and Interpreters’ Association, in
conjunction with the Irish Writers’ Centre, is proud to welcome Trevor Joyce, who will read from his
translations from Middle Irish, Chinese, and from the Hungarian, Turkic and Finno-Ugric languages,  as
well as his own original work.

Born in Dublin, in 1947, Trevor Joyce was brought up between Mary Street, in the city centre,
and the Galway Gaeltacht. Aged 19, he co-founded New Writers' Press in Dublin with Michael Smith.
Joyce was also a founding editor of NWP's influential journal,  The Lace Curtain. By the mid-’70s he had
largely withdrawn from the Press to develop his own poetry down less familiar and frequented routes.
In Dublin and Oxford, in the early ’80s, he conducted seminars and lectured on classical Chinese
poetry, and visited the People's Republic of China as a poet at the invitation of the Chinese government in
1983. Having read Philosophy and English at UCD, he moved to Cork where he read Mathematical
Sciences in UCC. He worked for twelve years as a Business Systems Analyst with Apple Computer at their
European manufacturing facility in Cork, but since January 2000 has been a full-time writer.
Joyce has published eleven volumes of poetry, including The Poems of Sweeny Peregrine (1976), his
working of the middle-Irish Buile Suibhne, and stone floods (1995), which was nominated for the  Irish Times
Literature Prize for Poetry. All these books have come through small presses, where openness to invention
compensates for lack of publicity, wide distribution or commercial promotion.

His most recent publications are  with the first dream of fire they hunt the cold: A Body of Work 1966–
2000 (NWP & Shearsman Books, 2001; 2nd edition 2003), a large collection from Toronto publisher The
Gig: What's in Store (2007), and a volume of translations, Courts of Air and Earth (Shearsman Books, 2008),

which was shortlisted for the Corneliu M Popescu Award for European Poetry in Translation 2009.
Founder and director of the  SoundEye  Poetry Festival  in Cork  since 1997, he held residencies
with Cork County Council (2001) and NUIG, (2001/2).

Joyce was a Fulbright Scholar for the year 2002–2003, and was Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellow
in Poetry to the University of Cambridge for 2009-10. He is a member of Aosdána, and has lived in Cork
since 1984.

IRISH TRANSLATORS’ AND INTERPRETERS’ ASSOCIATION

CUMANN AISTRITHEOIRÍ AGUS TEANGAIRÍ NA HÉIREANN

Irish Translators’ and Interpreters’ Association (ITIA), 19 Parnell Square, Dublin 1, Ireland

T: +353 87 6738386; F: +353 1 8726282; 

E: itiasecretary@gmail.com ; www.translatorsassociation.ie

International Translation Day, September 29th 2011