This episode features a poetry reading and roundtable on the joys and challenges of translating multilingual authors and texts. The conversation centres around a reading of Hope Mirrlees’s Paris / Parigi, delivered in English, French, and Italian by Nicoletta Asciuto, Boriana Alexandrova, Enora Le Roux, and Zoé Porchet. Alongside the readings, Dr. Nicoletta Asciuto discusses her interest in recuperating early twentieth-century women authors through translation, and her recently published Italian translation of Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: A Poem (1920). Dr. Boriana Alexandrova also discusses the power and peculiarity of infamously impenetrable multilingual texts, like James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), and archives, such as the messy and marvellous post-war archive of Surrealist queer couple and anti-Nazi Resistance fighters, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore.

Dr. Nicoletta Asciuto is a Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature at the University of York and a member of the EUTERPE consortium. Her recent publications include a cluster for Modernism/modernity, entitled “Modernist Periodical Studies and the Transnational Turn” (2023), and her monograph Brilliant Modernism: Cultures of Light and Modernist Poetry (2025). Her Italian translation of Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: A Poem (1920), the first translation of Mirrlees’s work into Italian, is out with Interno Poesia. Dr. Boriana Alexandrova is a Senior Lecturer at York's Centre for Women's Studies and York’s PI for EUTERPE. She is a scholar of European modernism, multilingualism, translation, and contemporary queer and feminist writing and performance, with a focus on disability, trauma, and artistic research methods. She is the author of Joyce, Multilingualism, and the Ethics of Reading (2020) and articles on translation, gender, the body, disability, and trauma in the works of James Joyce, Eimear McBride, Carmen Maria Machado, and Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, among others.

The discussion is chaired by EUTERPE doctoral candidate Alice Flinta (University of York’s Centre for Women's Studies) and features Professor Kimberly Campanello (University of Leeds) as a guest interlocutor.

Nicoletta Asciuto’s translation of Paris, published under the title Parigi, is available at the following link: https://internopoesialibri.com/libro/parigi/.

This panel was originally delivered on 19/05/2025 at the fourth biannual EUTERPE Doctoral School, held at the University of York in York, United Kingdom.

Please note that due to the performance and multilingual aspects of the roundtable some parts of the audio may be less clear than others.

The episode transcript can be accessed here.

This episode is part of the EUTERPE podcast Library on European Literatures and Genders from a Transnational Perspective.

The podcast is powered by the European Union, UKRI, and the Central European University Library.

Grant Agreement: 101073012 EUTERPE HORIZON-MSCA-2021-DN-01 Project.

For more information about the EUTERPE project please refer to the official project webpage https://www.euterpeproject.eu/, or follow us on Instagram @euterpe_project_ or Facebook at EUTERPE Doctoral Network Project.

This episode was edited by Evangeline Scarpulla.

Thank you to Alexander Walker for the music and to Alice Flinta for the voice over.

Thank you also to Ninutsa Nadirashvili, Evangeline Scarpulla and Kris Orszaghova for designing the podcast covers.