Opera Pub Night at Telegraph Brewing Company

Enjoy a beer with Opera Santa Barbara!

In anticipation of our next opera, Il Postino (The Postman), based on the Oscar-winning film about the poet Pablo Neruda, OSB is hosting an Opera Pub Night!

 Where: Telegraph Brewing Company

418 N Salsipuedes St, Santa Barbara, CA 93103

When: Wednesday, February 26th from 6pm-7:30pm

OSB takes over the taproom with speaker presentations, roundtable discussion, and audience Q&A. Explore recent publications by UCSB alumna, Jessica Powell (ventures of the infinite man) and author/filmmaker, Mark Eisner (Neruda: Biography of a Poet). UCSB Professor of Translation Studies, S. Jill Levine, reads from her work in Words Without Borders, and Mary Heebner dives deeper into her artist book, On the Blue Shores of Silence: Poems of the Sea.  Chaucer’s Books will have copies of books for sale with opportunities for author signing following the event.

About the Speakers:

 Jessica Powell:

Jessica Powell received her MA in Latin American Studies from Stanford University, and completed her Ph.D. in UCSB’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese, where she was first introduced to literary translation in a graduate seminar taught by Suzanne Jill Levine. Since completing her doctorate in 2006, she has published dozens of translations of works by a wide variety of Latin American writers. Her translation (with Suzanne Jill Levine) of Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo’s novel Where There’s Love, There’s Hate, was published by Melville House in 2013. She was the recipient of a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship in support of her translation of Antonio Benítez Rojo’s novel Woman in Battle Dress (City Lights, 2015), which was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Translation. Her translation of Wicked Weeds by Pedro Cabiya (Mandel Vilar Press, 2016), was named a finalist for the 2017 Best Translated Book Award and made the longlist for the 2017 National Translation Award. Her most recent translation, the first-ever English translation of Pablo Neruda’s book-length poem, venture of the infinite man, was published by City Lights Books in October of 2017.

Mark Eisner:

After graduating from the University of Michigan with High Honors in English/Creative Writing, Mark spent many years backpacking through Latin America, focused on experiential learning, especially in Chile, where he translated Neruda on a rustic ranch near the coast. He became friends with Chilean poets, scholars, and members of the Neruda Foundation. Upon his return, he was awarded a fellowship to earn a Masters in Latin American Studies from Stanford University. They subsequently named him a “Visiting Scholar” to continue his scholarly and creative work on Neruda.

On July 12, 2004, which would have been Neruda’s 100th birthday, Eisner was interviewed on NPR’s Morning Edition, reading Neruda’s poetry to millions. That evening at an overflowing Theater Artaud in San Francisco, he helped host what the San Francisco Chronicle called “a perfect birthday party.” Among the elements was the screening of a cinematic exploration of the poet that Eisner produced. It won the Latin American Studies Association’s Award of Merit in Film. This original film serves as the seed for the more ambitious “Pablo Neruda: The People’s Poet.”

Mark is the editor and the principal translator of the critically acclaimed The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems (City Lights, 2004). He wrote the introduction to the first ever English translation of Neruda’s third book, venture of the infinite man, a project he developed, published by City Lights in 2017. He just finished co-editing a multilingual anthology of Latin American Poetry in Resistance.

Suzanne Jill Levine:  

A prominent  translator as well as critic and scholar of Latin American literature, Suzanne Jill Levine’s books include Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman (Farrar Straus Giroux) and The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction.  Among her many honors including several PEN awards she has been a fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.  In the last decade her works include a five-volume edition of the prose and poetry of Jorge Luis Borges for Penguin Classics (2010), and Cristina Rivera Garza’s experimental novel The Taiga Syndrome, winner of the Shirley Jackson award, finalist for the National Translation Award and for the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award.  Her latest translation, for Seven Stories Press, is Guadalupe Nettle’s Bezoar and Other Unsettling Stories (2020).

Mary Heebner:

MARY HEEBNER is a painter, collage artist, writer, and she creates fine art books. Her work in public collections that include The Library of Congress, The National Gallery of Art, The New York Public Library, John Paul Getty Research Institute, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, University of California, Stanford University and The British Library. She is an alumni of UCSB’s College of Creative Studies, a Regent’s Scholar,  and received her MFA at UCSB under the mentorship of collage artist William Dole. Her collaboration and enduring friendship with translator Alastair Reid began in 1998, when she proposed a book project inspired by a recent visit to Pablo Neruda’s Isla Negra home in Chile and her love of the Pacific Ocean, that would pair her artwork with poems Neruda wrote about the sea. She titled it On the Blue Shore of Silence after a line in one of his poems, Forget About Me. In 2004 Harper Collins/Rayo published a trade version and author and filmmaker Antonio Skarmeta wrote the Afterword, to celebrate Pablo Neruda’s Centennario. Her studio is in Santa Barbara.