Carlos Suarez addresses a few salient issues of translation:

How to make a mess and influence literary history without getting caught.

The at times amusing troubles poetry translators get into, and how they survive them.

The uses of mirrors and echoes to fake a translation, and other tricks of the trade.

The dictionary as cemetery and purgatory.

And, if there is time…and there will be time…he will present a few of his own translations of short poems from South America and Italy, from the poets Dante, Borges, Julio Cortazar, Carlo Betocchi, Cesar Moro, Patrizia Valduga, Enrique Suarez and Gaetana Aulenti.

Gaetana Aulenti, architect and poet, 1927-2012

Carlos Suarez, Argentinian by birth and a man of the wider world by proclivity and experience, had a distinguished career as a photographic journalist that took him far afield over the crucial decades of the 1950s and 1960s. In Buenos Aries, he grew up with Enrique Suarez and encountered Borges; in Paris, he conversed with Cortazar; and among the mud angels of Florence, he came to know Gae Aulenti.

A San Francisco resident for the past several decades and a Bird & Beckett habitué, he remains to this day a fine poet, an astute observer of the human comedy and, in essence, a profoundly humanist philosopher.