Translation Tuesday at Mother Foucault's!
Tuesday, January 20, 2026
7:00 p.m.
Translation Tuesday triple feature!
Jay Boss Rubin will read three poems he translated from Swahili by Tanzanian author Euphrase Kezilahabi. Ági Bori will read her translations from Hungarian of a flash fiction piece by Miklós Vámos and two poems by Anna T. Szabó. Nina Perrotta will read her translation of a short essay by Mexican writer Julieta García González. The reading will be followed by a short Q&A.
Come have a glass of wine and a listen!
Jay Boss Rubin is a writer and literary translator from Swahili into English. His book-length translations include Rosa Mistika by Euphrase Kezilahabi (Yale University Press) and The Witness of Nina Mvungi and Other Stories by Esther Karin Mngodo (Hanging Loose Press). He is currently at work on the award-winning spy novel New Virus by Halfani Sudy (forthcoming from University of Georgia Press). He is a proud graduate of the Queens College MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation, and he currently serves as Managing Editor of Portland Tennis Courterly.
Euphrase Kezilahabi (1944–2020) was a Tanzanian fiction writer, poet, dramatist, philosopher, and scholar. He wrote six novels, and was among the very first Swahili writers to publish poetry in free verse. Kezilahabi was born and raised in the village of Namagondo, on Ukerewe Island in Lake Victoria. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Dar es Salaam, and a PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In 1995 he joined the faculty of the Department of African Languages and Literature at the University of Botswana, and taught there until shortly before his passing away.
Ági Bori originally hails from Hungary, and she has lived in the United States for more than thirty years. A decade ago, she decided to try her hand at translating and discovered she loved it. She mostly translates for Hungarian author Miklós Vámos, but occasionally renders the works of several poets from Hungarian into English, and vice versa. Her translations and writings are available or forthcoming in Asymptote, The Baffler, Hopscotch Translation, Northwest Review, Pool Party, The Rumpus, Trafika Europe, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. She is a translation editor at the Los Angeles Review.
Miklós Vámos is a Hungarian writer who has had over forty books published, many of them in multiple languages. He is the recipient of numerous literary accolades, including the 2016 Prima Primissima Award, one of the most prestigious awards in Hungary. His most successful book is The Book of Fathers, which has been translated into nearly thirty languages. His ancestors on his father’s side were Jews who perished in the Holocaust. Fortunately, his father—a member of a penitentiary march battalion—survived. His selected writings have appeared in Asymptote, The New York Times, Tablet, and Words Without Borders, among others.
Anna T. Szabó is a poet, writer, and translator. She was born in Transylvania (Romania) in 1972, moved to Hungary in 1987, studied English and Hungarian literature at the University of Budapest, and received her PhD in 2001 (her field of study being the translation of Shakespeare). She has published more than ten volumes of poetry for adults and nine for children, written three books of short stories, twelve plays, and has received several literary prizes. Translations of her poems have appeared in The Baffler, Hungarian Literature Online, and in various anthologies, most recently Under a Pannonian Sky, out from Seagull Books in December 2025.
Nina Perrotta is a literary translator from Spanish and Portuguese into English and an editor at Words Without Borders. Her translations have appeared in the Iowa Review, The Common, and La Lucha: Latin American Feminism Today (Charco Press, 2025), among other publications. Her first book-length translation, Clara Alves’s London on My Mind, was published by Scholastic in 2024. She has received grants and fellowships from MacDowell, the Fulbright Commission, the British Centre for Literary Translation, and the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference. In 2022, she was a finalist for the Peirene Stevns Translation Prize.
Julieta García González is a novelist, essayist, radio presenter, and podcaster. She is the author of several novels and short story collections, and her work has appeared in more than a dozen anthologies, as well as publications in Mexico, Spain, Argentina, France, England, and the United States. She has received grants from the Centro Mexicano de Escritores, Fonca, and the Casa Estudio Cien Años de Soledad. She hosts the radio show Acentos and won first prize for the Walter Reuter Prize for Journalism in multimedia in 2022.