UC Irvine will celebrate the formal launch of the International Center for Writing and Translation at the School of Humanities April 4 and 5, 2002. The inaugural events will feature Nigerian playwright, poet and Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, Chinese poet and essayist Bei Ling, world-renown philosopher and UCI professor Jacques Derrida and his foremost translator Peggy Kamuf, a professor of French and comparative literature at University of Southern California. Both events are free, open to the public and will be held in the Humanities Instructional Building, Room 100. Receptions will follow the presentations.

The center, established in July 2001, fosters writing, translation and criticism in multilingual and international contexts. It supports writers, translators and critics from around the world through short residencies and by bringing them together for readings, performances, lectures and international conferences. It also sponsors research activities and graduate fellowships in creative nonfiction and translation. The center is a partner to the International Institute of Modern Letters in Las Vegas, Nev.

"The International Center for Writing and Translation will enable us to support great writers and new talents from around the world and to foster translations of work previously undiscovered," said Karen Lawrence, dean of the School of Humanities. "Our partnership with the Institute of Modern Letters will help us assemble writers, translators and scholars to discuss the aesthetics and politics of translation and create graduate emphases in creative nonfiction and translation. It will also build on our nationally ranked creative writing, languages and literatures, history and interdisciplinary programs."

Kicking off the inaugural activities will be "Writing: An Evening with Wole Soyinka and Bei Ling" at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, April 4. The presentation will feature Soyinka reading from his play "King Baabu," and Bei Ling speaking about the literary situation in China and his own experience with censorship. A discussion will follow moderated by Ketu Ketrak, chair, Department of Asian American Studies at UCI.

The next day at 4 p.m. Friday, April 5, Derrida will discuss translation with his foremost translator Kamuf. Ellen Burt, associate professor, Department of French and Italian at UCI, will moderate the conversation. A reception will follow at 6:30 p.m. celebrating the opening of the "Derrida/Translating/Derrida" exhibit at UCI's main library.

The center was founded through an investment from Glenn Schaeffer, UCI alumnus and president and CFO of Mandalay Bay Resorts. Schaeffer, one of Las Vegas' most successful businessmen, is also a great lover of books and contemporary writing. He pledged funding for the center at UCI with a challenge for the school to raise matching gift amounts in the coming years.

Schaeffer believes literature has a civilizing influence on society. He says ideas in books can change how people choose to live and what they're willing to live for. "This country, the greatest economic force in world history, would not exist in the same way if two books-Thomas Paine's 'Common Sense' and Harriet Beecher Stowe's 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'-hadn't been published and widely distributed. These books were community builders par excellence. The institute in Las Vegas and the center in Irvine will exemplify literary activism if we assist one more writer to be heard, read or proclaimed, and then another, and then another. The efficient laws of literature hold that the few can persuade the many."

RSVP for the inaugural events by contacting Barbara Thomas at (949) 824-1342, or email develop-the-humanities@uci.edu. For more information on the center go to www.hnet.uci.edu/icwt.

UC Irvine International Center for Writing and Translation

The International Center for Writing and Translation in the School of Humanities at UC Irvine fosters writing, translation and criticism in multilingual and international contexts. The center possesses an international scope, a focus that champions writing and an earnest exploration of translation as a challenge and practice. It links existing faculty research interests in cultural literacy to general discussions about linguistic and cultural issues relevant to the diverse, multiethnic and multilinguistic student population at UCI and to the population of California in general. Through its support of writers, critics and translators, the center cultivates an awareness of the international world of letters and steers research and creative activities in the humanities in vital, new directions.

Goals and Mission

The following goals are integral to the center's general mission:

• Support writers working in various languages and diverse genres, including fiction and creative nonfiction, through grants and residencies
  

• Foster research and discussion of the theory, practice, aesthetics and politics of translation, broadly conceived
  

• Support translations of work of literary merit (in partnership with the International Institute of Modern Letters in Las Vegas, Nev.)
  

• Sponsor conferences, workshops and public fora on writing and translation, as well as readings and performances
  

• Support activities of UCI faculty, students and the surrounding community involving the far-reaching themes of cultural literacy and cross-cultural transposition.

Leadership
Dragan Kujundzic, associate professor of English and comparative literature, serves as acting director, and Karen Lawrence is dean of the School of Humanities. An internal and external board of directors governs the center. The two-board structure is composed of an internal advisory committee of UCI faculty whose scholarly interests intersect with the center's mission and an external executive board of prominent writers and scholars from the U.S. and abroad. Wole Soyinka, Nobel Laureate in Literature and head of literary arts of the International Institute of Modern Letters in Las Vegas, serves ex officio on the center advisory board. Others on the board are former Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Mark Strand; writer and journalist Elena Poniatowska; Jacques Derrida, professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and at UCI; Michael Wood, chair of the Department of English at Princeton University; Gayatri Spivak, Avalon Professor of Literature at Columbia University; poet and essayist Bei Ling; translator Dilek Dizdar of Boaziçi University and the University of Mainz; and Susan Kent, Los Angeles City Librarian.

Partners
The International Center for Writing and Translation is a partner to the International Institute of Modern Letters at Las Vegas, along with the Iowa Writers' Workshop; the University of Nevada, Las Vegas; Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand; and the International Parliament of Writers in Paris. The International Institute of Modern Letters' primary purpose is to identify and support writers and translators worldwide through academic fellowships, grants and prizes. This role extends beyond that of expected patronage to a "literary activism." Glenn Schaeffer, an alumnus of UCI and president and CFO of Mandalay Bay Resorts, is founding patron.

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES
UC Irvine International Center for Writing and Translation
Inaugural Celebration, April 4 and 5, 2002

Wole Soyinka

Akinwande Oluwole Soyinka, the Nigerian playwright, poet, novelist and critic, received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. He writes of modern West Africa in a satirical style and with a tragic sense of the obstacles to human progress.

A member of the Yoruba people, Soyinka attended Government College and University College in Ibadan before graduating in English in 1958 from the University of Leeds in England. Upon his return to Nigeria, Soyinka founded a national theater, The Masks (later the Orisun Theatre) and wrote his first important play, "A Dance of the Forests," for the Nigerian independence celebrations. The play satirizes the fledgling nation by stripping it of romantic legend and by showing that the present is no more a golden age than was the past.

In this and other dramas, Soyinka fuses Western elements with subject matter and dramatic techniques deeply rooted in Yoruba folklore and religion. He uses symbolism, flashback and ingenious plotting to create a rich dramatic structure. Soyinka's works exhibit humor and fine poetic style as well as his gift for irony and satire and for accurately matching the language of complex characters to their social position and moral qualities.

Soyinka's novels are "The Interpreters" (1965) and "Season of Anomy," which appeared in 1973. His volumes of poetry include "Idanre and Other Poems" (1967), "Poems from Prison" (1969; republished as "A Shuttle in the Crypt," 1972), and "Mandela's Earth and Other Poems" (1988). He wrote a good deal of "Poems from Prison" while a political prisoner in 1967-69. "The Man Died" (1972) is his prose account of his arrest and imprisonment. Soyinka's principal critical work is "Myth, Literature, and the African World" (1976), a collection of essays in which he examines the role of the artist in the light of Yoruba mythology and symbolism.

Soyinka was the first black African to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. His autobiography, "Ake: The Years of Childhood," was published in 1981 and a companion piece, "Isara: A Voyage Around Essay," in 1989.

Soyinka is director of literary arts for the International Institute of Modern Letters, and he holds an untitled chair in creative writing in the English Department at UNLV.

Bei Ling

Bei Ling, a poet and essayist, is the founder and editor of "Tendency," a literary journal founded in late 1993 and published in Chinese. He is also the founder and executive director of the Independent Chinese PEN Center in 2001, an organization of Chinese writers and intellectuals based in Boston, Mass., and dedicated to the freedom of expression. In August 2000, Bei Ling was arrested for "illegally publishing" his journal in China. After a brief time in a Beijing jail, with the help of the international society and the American State Department, he was released and expelled from China. He is on the executive board of the International Center for Writing and Translation at UCI and research associate at Harvard University's Fairbank Center for East Asian Research.

Bei Ling's poetry, essays and book reviews have been published in the Los Angeles Times, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, The New Republic, the New York Times and The Harvard Review. His poetry has been translated from Chinese into English, Japanese, German, French and Spanish.

Bei Ling was a winner of the PEN Center U.S. West 2000 Freedom to Write Award. Since 1995, he has received the Hellman Hammett Award (1995 and 2001), the Kunstlerhaus Schloss Wiepersdorf Fellowship (1998), the German Academic Exchange Service Fellowship (DAAD, 1997) and Brown University's Critical Writing Program Fellowship (1990-1993). Bei Ling writes: "I am one for whom personal freedom is a precondition for survival."

Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida is professor of philosophy and directeur d'Etudes at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociales in Paris. Since 1986 he also has been a UCI Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, French and Comparative Literature. He is one of the most prominent philosophers of the 20th century and has influenced debates in philosophy around the world. Deconstruction has to a large extent facilitated the emergence of the linguistic and rhetorical turn in critical theory. Derrida is the author of more than 50 books on philosophy, literature, the arts, ethnology, Marxism, psychoanalysis and critical legal studies.

Peggy Kamuf

Peggy Kamuf is the Marion Frances Chevalier Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. Her most recent book is "The Division of Literature, or the University in Deconstruction." She has translated numerous works by Jacques Derrida and others, edited "A Derrida Reader," as well as a collection of recent essays by Derrida in her translation, "Without Alibi," published in 2002.

Facts
Biographies

Lori Brandt
(949) 824-5484
lbrandt@uci.edu