Between Languages: Poetry and the Experience of Self-Translation
Maison Suger is pleased to host the meeting "Between Languages: Poetry and the Experience of Self-Translation", organised by Yadh ben Achour & Agnès Whitfield.
This event features a dialogue between two voices on poetry and poetic translation, explored as practices of creation, reflection, and movement between languages. Yadh Ben Achour and Agnès Whitfield will present their respective poetic works, discussing the conditions of their writing, formal choices, and the challenges–particularly aesthetic ones–that underpin them. The highlight of the evening will be an interview conducted by Agnès Whitfield, a professor of translation studies and herself a poet and self-translator, who will ask Yadh Ben Achour about his practice of self-translation: how does a poem shift from one language to another? What is transformed, persists, or is reinvented? The discussion will be punctuated by bilingual readings and exchanges with the audience, offering a reflection on poetry across languages.
The meeting will be held in French.
A renowned jurist and intellectual, former professor of public law, and a leading figure in contemporary constitutional thought, Yadh Ben Achour is also a poet. His poetic work explores the themes of freedom, internal exile, the relationship to language, and memory. Writing in both Arabic and French, he has developed a practice of self-translation, conceived as an extension of the poetic act itself. Poetry Publications
A full professor in the Department of English at York University (Toronto), Agnès Whitfield specializes in literary translation, autobiographical writing, and self-translation. A poet and essayist, she is also the founding director of Vita Traductiva, a scholarly series in translation studies. Her poetic and critical work explores the connections between voice, language, identity, and displacement, through a conscious practice of writing and rewriting across languages. Poetry Publications (selection)
Monday, 8 June 2026
6:00 pm-8:00 pm
*The meeting will be held in French*
--
Maison Suger
16-18 Rue Suger
Paris 6
--
Free entrance
How Many Points Are There in a Line Segment? From Grosseteste to Numerosity
The Subject and the Human Sciences in the Face of Artificial Intelligence
The transhumanist mirage: fantasizing about the metamorphosis of human
