International Translators Day Extravaganzas

There are many, many things going on to mark International Translation Day this year, or Hieronymustag as the less heathen Germans like to call it.

Start the fun in Berlin this Friday, 19 September with an all-day symposium (you can still register until tomorrow). "The translation of literary works is the most complex form of translation. In three panel discussions," (one of them featuring yours truly) "we want to examine various aspects of the profession: How can I become a literary translator? Do I need formal training, how about further education? Is it worth translating literature? What's the situation with recognition for literary translators? What could and ought to change? Are there objective and content-related boundaries to literary translation? How do literary translators deal with apparently untranslatable cultural divergences?"

Then take the plane to London for another all-day fun-fest on Friday, 26 September, this time at the British Library - don't worry, this one also features your favourite blogger on adoring Teutonic literature. "Now in its fifth year, the International Translation Day symposium is an annual event for the translation community. It is an opportunity for translators, students, publishers, booksellers, librarians, bloggers and reviewers to gather and debate significant issues and developments within the sector, to discuss challenges and to celebrate success."

The actual St. Jerome's Day is Tuesday, 30 September. And if you're in one of 17 cities around the world and would like to see a real-live translator actually translating out of German, you're in luck. Because on that day there's a whole programme of translators actually leaving the house and interacting with other human beings:

Amsterdam
Ard Posthuma translating Ulrike Draesner and Jean Pierre Rawie

Bratislava, 6 p.m., Goethe-Institut library, Panenská 33
Zuzana Demjánová translating Katja Petrowskaja into Slovakian

Buenos Aires
Nicolás Gelormini translating Katja Petrowskaja into Spanish

Istanbul
Dilman Muradoğlu translating into Turkish

Cairo, 4 p.m., Goethe-Institut library
Dr. Ola Adel Abdel Gawad translating Jonas Lüscher into Arabic

Kiev (28 September!! 2:30 p.m., Goethe-Institut Ukraine, library, Wul. Woloska 12/4, 04655 Kiev
Nelia Vakhovska translating Robert Walser into Ukrainian

London
Jamie Bulloch translating Nora Bossong into English

Mexico City
Claudia Cabrera translating Arnold Zweig into Spanish

Minsk
Iryna Herasimovich translating into Belorussian

New Delhi
Namita Khare translating Jenny Erpenbeck into Hindi

Beijing (29 September!!)
Huang Liaoyu translating Martin Walser into Chinese

Rio de Janeiro
Marcelo Backes translating Saša Stanišić into Portuguese

Sao Paulo
Petê Rissatti translating Thomas Brussig into Portuguese

Stockholm
Aimée Delblanc translating Katja Petrowskaja into Swedish

Tel Aviv
Daphna Amit translating Jennifer Teege into Hebrew

Tiflis
Anna Kordsaia-Samadaschwili translating into Georgian

Wellington, 4. p.m., National Library of New Zealand
Maike Wetzel translated into English by John Jamieson and then by Ian Cormack into Te Reo Maori

You may not make it to all the events. But make sure you wear a donkey's ear in your buttonhole to remember St. Jerome, who chopped off his donkey's ear to make a bookmark-slash-ink blotter for his bible translation. Hence the German word Eselsohr for when you turn down the corner of a page to keep your place in a book. Jerome knew God would forgive him, and help the donkey to hear with her other ear, because he was doing a very important job that made him immune to purgatorial punishment for cruelty to animals. In days gone by, translators around the world pinned real donkey's ears to their clothing on 30 September but now most of us prefer to use a vegan version.

More Translator Interviews

Watch out! There's a sudden fever for interviewing translators. Seems like people have decided we are interesting after all. I'm pleased - this is one of the things I think blogs are excellent at, casting a light on subjects that have otherwise been considered too niche to bother with.

Lizzy Siddal at Lizzy's Literary Life (no stranger to translator interviews and one of the bloggers holding international literature high in the UK) has an interview with Donal McLaughlin, shortlisted no less for the BTBA. Lizzy knows Donal, and I know Donal too. He's a man with a huge amount of enthusiasm and talent, always willing to help out and also always dashing about the world.

And JC Sutcliffe has just launched a whole bunch of interviews with translators - as part of her "Three Rs" series, in which she's interviewed a huge number of writers about their work. JC is a translator herself and often looks at translated literature on her blog Slightly Bookist. The first interview is with me. 

And Lisa Carter at Intralingo has started a regular feature casting an, erm, Spotlight on... - interviewing literary translators, so far Lucas Klein (Chinese), Lydia Razran Stone (Russian) and C.M. Mayo (Spanish).

Not to forget Cristina Vezzaro's awesome new site Authors & Translators.

Perhaps because the sun is sort of shining and I'm planning a shopping spree, I've decided to view this development as a symptom of burgeoning interest in translated writing in general and growing respect for translators' work - along with some very cool literary magazine projects and a smattering of new small publishers emerging right now. More on that another time. Also, of course, it's a sign that translators are promoting each other and perhaps realising that people might be interested in what we have to say. Hooray.

Grüezi miteinand

I have escaped for a moment to reassure you of my existence. Our workshop leaders are pushing us hard and Switzerland has many charms to distract a person from her computer. But rest assured, there are twelve translatorly egos around our workshop table, and we won't stop until we've pulled apart every person's text. All we know is that we know nothing.

More later.

Events Round-Up

Excitement looms, with three interesting events on the horizon.

1. Übersetzer packen aus at the Literaturwerkstatt Berlin on Thursday night. This time it's a special on dialogue, starring Susanne Mende and Kristof Magnusson. Susanne translates mainly Latin American literature and teaches literary translation in Potsdam. She also writes and runs the Berlin Crime Writing Salon. And Kristof is actually from Iceland, writes plays, prose and essays in German and translates from Icelandic. He looks uncannily like someone I used to work with and is a bugger to translate. I'll be interested to meet him and will be behind the bar as usual.

2. Kraftfeld Moderne at the LCB this coming Monday. John E. Woods presents the translators Doreen Daume, Helmut Frielinghaus und Susanne Höbel on Bruno Schulz and William Faulkner. And perhaps John will bring along his glow-in-the-dark medal to reflect its light on all translators present.

3. Murder Farm at the Goethe-Institut in London on Tuesday. Andrea Maria Schenkel launches the English translation of the out-of-nowhere bestseller Tannöd. Apparently, although the press release doesn't tell you so, her translator Anthea Bell will also be there.

So, Berliners or anyone stuck in boring old London. Get your skates on for some fine translation-related evening entertainment. And don't say I never tell you anything.

More Unpacking

Speak of the devil. No sooner do I mention the lovely Dorota Stroinska in my last post, and she goes and reveals all in a library. Not in the traditional sense of the word, of course.

The Berlin Übersetzer packen aus team is playing away this Friday - with a guest appearance at the Kurt Tucholsky Library in Prenzlauer Berg. Dorota translated Wojciech Kuczok's novel Dreckskerl from Polish into German - along with Gabriele Leupold, who was nominated for the Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair this year. They've already "done" this event once so I happen to know that they're both very witty, insightful and entertaining.

If you're thinking, "Damn, why can't they do that in the Rhine area?" you're in luck. Because next week is the first ever Translators Reveal All reading in Cologne. Hartmut Fähndrich and Stefan Weidner meet up next Tuesday to talk about their work as translators from Arabic at Buchhandlung Kaiser.

So two evenings to shatter illusions: Arabic literature that isn't Arabian Nights, and Polish literature that's funny as well as dark. Incidentally, my first encounter with Polish literature was when a sailor showed me and my young friends his poetry in his cabin on board a ferry to Ireland - all we could make out was the word hemoroidy. Then he showed us the stars, with Dire Straits playing quietly in the background.

Hamburgerz Reveal All

Hamburgers! If you're reading this and you happen to live in or near that great city, and you happen to be at a loose end on Wednesday evening, and you happen to be interested in good books and translation, then you're in for a treat.

For it is the turn of the Hamburg crew to reveal all. I can almost certainly guarantee there will be no nudity, however, at least not in the flesh, heh heh. Contrary to popular tradition, I have actually read one of the books in question and can assure you it is very good indeed - namely Naomi Aldermann's Disobedience, presented by her German translator Miriam Mandelkow. She'll be chatting with the ever-so-good Annette Kopetsky and the really-rather-entertaining* Isabel Bogdan, who's translated Tamar Yellin's The Genizah at the House of Shepher.

I'm really rather envious of all those Hamburgers.


* I do know these hyphens are superfluous, dear colleagues, I just wanted it to match the adjective before.