Home Out of Place: seminar by poet Aurelio Asiain

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Home Out of Place.
Writing, reading, translating, and teaching as forms of exile

Date: 28 Feb 2018 (Wed)
Time: 4:30 pm – 6:00pm
Venue: Room 4.36, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

Abstract:
The number of Mexican writers living abroad has never been as high as it is now. We can find them in several countries, although preferred places have definitely shifted from Paris to American cities, and from attics to humanities departments. But then, as Felipe Fernandez Armesto has argued, the United States has always been a Hispanic nation and is increasingly becoming a Latin American country. Living in Japan implies a very different experience for a Mexican writer, even in an age when the internet connects us instantly and globally. It has changed my practice of writing, my ideas on translation, and surely my identity.

Bio
Aurelio Asiain (1960) is a Mexican poet, essayist, critic, and translator living in Japan since 2002. For fifteen years editor in chief of the literary monthly magazine Vuelta, directed by Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz, after Paz’ death Asiain founded a literary quarterly: Paréntesis (1999-2002). From 2002 to 2007 he served as cultural attaché of the Embassy of Mexico in Tokyo. Since then he has been a professor at Kansai Gaidai University. His 17 books include poetry, essays, translations, anthologies. Most recent are Japón en Octavio Paz and a Spanish version of the Hyakunin-isshu: Centena de cien poetas.