Short Bio
Marília Jöhnk teaches Comparative Literature at Goethe University Frankfurt. She completed her PhD in Romance Literatures at Humboldt University of Berlin with a book on the Latin American travel writing of Mário de Andrade, Gabriela Mistral, and Henri Michaux (published by transcript in 2021). After obtaining a scholarship from the Interdisciplinary Centre for European Enlightenment Studies at Halle, she started working on her current book project on translingual women writers in the 18th century, which connects different authors from Spain, France, and Portugal through their engagement with the poetry of Sappho. Marília has published on translation theory, multilingualism, and travel writing, and is interested in non-canonical authors and forms of writing and artmaking. For further information: marilia-joehnk.de
Project for the Network
Networks and Things in Cecília Meireles’ Poemas italianos
In the 1950s, the Brazilian modernist poet Cecília Meireles travelled through Italy and wrote around forty poems, published as a collected volume titled Poemas Italianos after her death in 1968 by the Italian-Brazilian cultural institute in São Paulo in a bilingual edition. The Italian translations of this bilingual artwork were made by Edoardo Bizzarri, a key figure in the cultural dialogue between both countries during the 20th century. In my reading of the poems, I will consider the importance of materiality, networks, and connectivity, relying on the theoretical framework provided by Bruno Latour, Jane Bennett, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, among others. My emphasis lies on the non-human actors portrayed by Cecília Meireles, such as stones, which show how both objects and matter have stories to tell and are active parts of the transatlantic dialogue between the Portuguese and Italian-speaking world.