Amid the turmoil of 1970, the PEN “World of Translation” conference—billed as the first international translation conference in the United States— altered perspectives and created new realms of literary possibility for the English-speaking world. In the turmoil of the present day, “Translating the Future” (launched May 12, 2020) will reflect on how literary translation—the “language of languages” as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o calls it—has changed since 1970, and invite a collective, international envisioning of what it might become over the next half-century.

Sponsored by the Center for the Humanities at the City University of New York Graduate Center, PEN America, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.