Raúl Zurita Joins Columbia University to Launch Sawyer Seminar on “Global Language Justice
In September, renowned Chilean poet Raúl Zurita was invited to Columbia University to participate in a series of events inaugurating the Sawyer Seminar on “Global Language Justice,” organized by the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society (ICLS) and funded by a two-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Under the theme “Poetry as Pluriverse: Thinking Global Language Justice,” the seminar featured workshops and readings that explored topics such as the social effects of English monolingualism, the intersection of language and technology, and the challenges of translation across disciplinary boundaries.
Raúl Zurita is celebrated as one of the most significant figures in contemporary Latin American poetry. He received the National Prize for Literature in 2000, the Pablo Neruda Prize in 1998, and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship in 1984, among numerous other accolades. He is best known globally for his trilogy Purgatory-Anteparadise-The New Life, and in 1982, verses from the second volume were famously displayed in the skies of New York by five airplanes, forming letters eight kilometers high.
The inaugural event of the Sawyer Seminar took place at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America and featured a poetry reading with Zurita and fellow poets Mohammed Bennis, Bei Dao, Sharmistha Mohanty, Daouda Ndiaye, Nabaneeta Dev Sen, Anne Waldman, Orlando White, and Zhai Yongming. Additional activities included a workshop on International Poetry, Translation, and Language Justice, moderated by Susan Bernofsky, a leading translator of German-language literature and Director of the Literary Translation program at Columbia's School of the Arts. This discussion also included poets Sinan Antoon, Mohammed Bennis, Anna Deeny, Nabaneeta Dev Sen, Uche Nduka, Jennifer Hayashida, Tonya Foster, and Zhai Yongming, who shared their experiences with translation across diverse languages and cultures.
The two-day event concluded with another poetry reading at Columbia’s Poet House, where writers from various countries reflected on the life and death of languages. Participants included Zurita from Chile, Bei Dao from China, Nabaneeta Dev Sen from India, Daouda Ndiaye from Senegal, Anne Waldman from New Jersey, and Zhai Yongming from China. A complete audio recording of this event is available here.
The Sawyer Seminar on “Global Language Justice” aims to address language justice as the humanistic counterpart to environmental justice, emphasizing the urgency of addressing the simultaneous decline of linguistic diversity and endangered biodiversity. The two-year grant will support ICLS in developing a cutting-edge research and pedagogical program that intersects science, humanities, and big data. This initiative will create a unique and lasting legacy around the critical issue of language justice by incubating new graduate and undergraduate courses and advancing innovative research directions in the humanities and social sciences.