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VCUQatar presents its lecture series; Image, Word, and Voice.A lecture series sponsored by the General Education Program and will start with a lecture by Khaled Mattawa on Tuesday, 27 November, 2007 at 7 pm in the VCUQ Atrium. Refreshments will be served at the event.
"The goal of VCUQatar's General Education Program is to ensure that students acquire the intellectual skills and breadth of knowledge that will not only contribute to the success of their studies in design but will also prepare them for the challenges and opportunities to come, both within and beyond their chosen fields. The program's new visiting speakers series, Image Word, and Voice, is intended to supplement their education by extending the range of visitors—of thinkers—to which our students are exposed. In the coming months, we will be bringing a variety of poets, novelists, essayists, and filmmakers to Doha. Young and old, male and female, they come from the Earth's four corners. What they all have in common is that they are committed to using either the image, the word, or both to communicate, to give voice to, something of what it means to be alive at the beginning of the 21st century." explained Jeff Lodge, Interim Area Coordinator, General Education, Assistant Professor of English VCUQatar.
Khaled Mattawa, a poet and translator, theseries' firstspeaker is the author of the poetry collections Zodiac of Echoes and Ismailia Eclipse, and translator of three volumes of contemporary Arabic poetry, Khaled Mattawa has received a Guggenheim fellowship, the Alfred Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and an NEA translation grant. His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Pushcart Prize Anthology, and numerous magazines, including Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, Antioch Review, New England Review and The Black Warrior Review. Mattawa was born in Benghazi, Libya, and immigrated to the U.S. in his teens. He teaches at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
"The great poets are the ones who have a wider sense of what they can see, of what they allow themselves to see, and what they allow themselves to feel or empathize with. What translation teaches you is that there is something before you that is whole, that needs to be conveyed. It teaches you to try to perfect the poem at the cost of yourself. The work is deeply impersonal—you are in the service of this poem and not of your ego." noted Mattawa.