Drafting Table – Featured Poet Session

Welcome to Drafting Table, where we share our emerging poems with each other and provide feedback in a safe and inclusive environment.

Maybe you have been attending the Getting Started sessions and feel ready to edit your work and develop your ideas. Maybe you’re an experienced but unpublished poet who wants to take those next steps in your poetry career. Just bring a willingness to receive and provide feedback with the whole group!

This session will enable you to explore the possibilities and creative opportunities of poetry translation. Ben and Mark have worked together on a range of Argentine writers, and they will discuss their translation methods, as well as reading from their versions of poems by Sergio Raimondi, Mirta Rosenberg and Ezequiel Zaidenwerg. This will be followed by a workshop and the chance to share thoughts and ideas. No knowledge of Spanish or previous experience of translation is required.

Your guest facilitators will be…

Ben Bollig teaches Spanish and Latin American Literature and Film at St Catherine’s College, Oxford. His books include Politics and Public Space in Contemporary Argentine Poetry (2016) and Modern Argentine Poetry: Displacement, Exile, Migration (2011). His published translations include Cristian Aliaga’s The Foreign Passion (Influx, London, 2016) and, with Mark Leech, Sergio Raimondi: Selected Poems (Liverpool University Press, 2023).

Mark Leech lives in Oxford. His most recent chapbook, Borderlands, a follow-up to his Chang’an Poems, is published by Original Plus. He has published chapbooks of Spanish and Old English translations, and London Water, a sequence of long poems about London’s hidden rivers. His short stories can be read and listened to at https://intothewords314194090.wordpress.com/ and https://www.youtube.com/@markexists. He won the Stephen Spender Prize in 2004 for his translation of the Old English poem The Dream of the Rood.

Feel free to email any queries to opldraftingtable@gmail.com