Event Highlights: Alicia Borinsky, Gloria Gervitz & Mark Schafer | Latin American Studies

Event Highlights: Alicia Borinsky, Gloria Gervitz & Mark Schafer

This virtual conversation about literature and translation with Alicia Borinsky, Gloria Gervitz, and Mark Schafer centered around Schafer’s translation of Gloria Gervitz’s epic work, Migrations, out this month from New York Review of Books.

Forty-four years in the making, Migrations is considered by critics to be a masterpiece of modern Mexican literature. Gloria Gervitz’s book is an epic journey in free verse through the individual and collective memories of Jewish women emigrants from Eastern Europe, a conversation that ranges across two thousand years of poetry, a bridge that spans the oracles of ancient Greece and the markets of modern Mexico, a prayer that blends the Jewish and Catholic liturgies, a Mexican woman’s reclamation through poetry of her own voice and erotic power. In its reach, audacity, and astonishing vitality, Gervitz’s extraordinary life’s work bears comparison to the achievements of HD, Lorine Niedecker, Ezra Pound, and Walt Whitman.

The event, hosted by the Center for Latin American Studies, took place on Thursday, November 18, 2021.

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The Center for Latin American Studies at Boston University is proud of BU’s history of diversity and inclusion. BU’s founders opened the University’s doors to all students without regard to religion, race, or gender, and building and sustaining a vibrant community of scholars, students, and staff remains essential to its mission of contributing to and preparing students to thrive in, an increasingly interconnected world.

Success in a competitive, global milieu depends upon our ongoing commitment to welcome and engage the wisdom, creativity, and aspirations of all peoples and the Center for Latin American Studies is vital to the University’s mission of preparing global citizens. We forge concrete initiatives to integrate faculty and students across the university in the promotion of antiracism, diversity, and inclusion from a Latin American Studies perspective. Through our in-depth and interdisciplinary academic programs, as well as through a rich array of talks, lectures, round-table discussions, conferences, and other educational and cultural events, we assist the University in its efforts to create environments for learning, working, and living that are enriched by racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity.

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