Translation Series (1): Shards of the Infinite: Leslie Kaplan’s First Three Books. With Julie Carr and Jennifer Pap, Sunday, March 30, 2025, 7pm

Join us Sunday, March 30, 2025, for the first event in the Translation Series, “Shards of the Infinite: on Leslie Kaplan’s First Three Books,” with Julie Carr and Jennifer Pap. The event takes place at 7pm at Counterpath (7935 East 14th Ave. in Denver). Free and open to the public.

Carr and Pap will read from their translations of French writer Leslie Kaplan’s first three books, Excess—The Factory, The Book of Skies, and The Criminal. They will discuss these books in the context of the May ’68 uprising, which Kaplan participated in and which in many ways influenced all her subsequent work. The three books move from the alienated space of the factory to the surrounding villages and cities that are infused with the factory’s violence, and finally to La Borde, a radical non-hierarchical mental health clinic that defined itself against the damaging structures of capital.  

Julie Carr’s most recent books are Underscore; Mud, Blood, and Ghosts: Populism, Eugenics, and Spiritualism in the American West; Real Life: An Installation; Climate, co-written with Lisa Olstein;and the essay collection, Someone Shot My Book. Her co-translations (with Jennifer Pap) of Leslie Kaplan’s Excess-The Factory and The Book of Skies,were published by Commune Editions and Pamenar Press, respectively. Overflow, a trilogy, will be published sequentially over the next few years.

Jennifer Pap teaches French and Francophone Studies at the University of Denver. She has written articles on a number of 20th century and contemporary French poets, writers, and artists among which Guillaume Apollinaire, Georges Braque, René Char, Dominique Fourcade, and Leslie Kaplan. Besides her co-translations with Julie Carr, she has translated Leslie Kaplan’s Disorder: A Fable (AK Press, 2020), and Miss Nobody Knows (coming soon from Tripwire).

(Translation series generously funded by Denver Arts & Venues.)