Translating Cube and more: The TransStar Europe project in the new year
Translating Cube – literary translation as an art
TransStar Europe has initiated the project called Translating Cube – Six Sides of European Literature and Translation, which takes a look at the art of literary translation and presents it to a broad audience. Starting January 2014 until the autumn of 2015, six series of events all dealing with the art of literary translation will take place in Krakow, Stuttgart, Ljubljana, Tübingen, Prague and Berlin, each lasting several days.
The first series of translating cube events will take place in Krakow. Readings, discussions and presentations on literary translation will take place at different venues in Krakow 16 – 18 January.
Yoko Tawada (Berlin) will join her translators Ines Hudobec (Croatian), Magdalena Lewandowska (Polish) and Olha Kravchuk (Ukrainian) on a tour of Europe and Japan on the 16th of January at the event called Where Europe Starts, where she will illustrate how ideas, languages and texts emerge from and merge with cultures.
An afternoon entirely dedicated to literary translation will take place on the 17th of January at the Goethe Institute Krakow. Ryszard Wojnakowski (Krakow) will speak about the asymmetries of translating into large and small languages. Translators from the EU-funded project TransStar Europe will show and comment on things that do not exist elsewhere for the audience. Together with the audience Yurko Prokhasko (Lviv), literary translator from German into Ukrainian, and Dorota Stroińska (Berlin), literary translator into Polish, will translate Goethe’s Elective Affinities, demonstrating the translation process starting with the reading of the first sentence in order to look for suitable formulations to the final completed text passage. In the evening Ulrike Almut Sandig and Marlen Pelny (both Berlin) will play and recite Poetry for Friends of Pop Music at the Małopolski Ogród Sztuki.
At the Café Czuły Barbarzyńca new German prose in Polish translation will be presented by TransStar translators on Saturday, 18 January. Presented will be texts by Peter Licht, Zsuzsanna Gahse, Jenny Erpenbeck and Svenja Leiber. In the evening Sylwia Chutnik (Warsaw) will read from her novel Dzidzia and will engage in discussion with her translators Magda Wlostowska and Zofia Sucharska.
You can find the entire program of Translating Cube in Krakow at the following link.
The project Translating Cube – Six Sides of European Literature and Translation is sponsored by the Federal Cultural Foundation, the Program for Lifelong Learning of the European Union and the Robert Bosch Foundation.
Networking Meeting of TransStar in January 2014
The first networking meeting of the EU-funded project TransStar Europe in Krakow will take place at the same time as Translating Cube. Participants will receive training on the basics of European cultural management. Part of the program is an introduction into cultural management by Antje Contius (Berlin), Amalija Maček (Ljubljana) and Alida Bremer (Münster); a workshop on the promotion of literature with Renata Serednicka (Krakow); a workshop on the cooperation between the publisher and the translator with Norbert Wehr (Cologne) and Alida Bremer (Münster); a workshop on the role of the translator on the literary marketplace with Ivona Novacka (Krakow) and a teamwork exercise on the preparation of publishers’ assessments under the tutelage of Kristina Kallert (Regensburg), Daniela Kocmut (Graz) and Claudia Dathe (Tübingen).
Publications
Current translations from the TransStar project can be found in the November edition of the LICHTUNGEN magazine. Magdalena Becher presents her translation of the short story Emil by the Czech author Jan Balabán. In Summertime War Diary the Croatian author Vladimir Stojsavljević shows the tristesse in Zagreb in the year 1991. The excerpt was translated by Evelyn Sturl. The novel Yugoslavia, My Country deals with the latest history of the Balkans by the Slovenian author Goran Vojnović, an excerpt of which was translated by Franziska Mazi for Lichtungen. With her translation Marlena Breuer introduces the phantasmagorical novel Bestiarium by Polish author Tomasz Różycki. The essay Levels of Lviv by Yuri Izdryk (Ukraine), translated by Constanze Aka, leads the reader into the Lviv of Eastern Galicia which has been totally disfigured as a result of an advancing epidemic.
Translator of the Month
In January 2014 you will be able to read a portrait of the Slovenian translator Janez Gradišnik on the TransStar web page. The article you will find in the section “Translator of the Month“ under www.transstar-europa.org.
Literaturhaus Stuttgart – our new TransStar Partner
Beginning in the new year, our partner Dr. Stefanie Stegman will be the director of the Literaturhaus Stuttgart. We would like to cordially congratulate her on this new position.
With her transfer the TransStar Europe project will gain a new partner. The Literaturhaus Stuttgart will thus replace the Literaturbüro Freiburg in January and in the autumn of 2014 it will host the next translation workshops and will be the second station in the Translating Cube.
The Translators from LICHTUNGEN
Magdalena Becher
Magdalena Becher (*1982) studied Political Science and Bohemian Studies in Regensburg and Brno. Following internships at the contact office of Bridge / Most Foundation in Prague and the Consulate of the Czech Republic in Düsseldorf, she works as program coordinator at the Czech Center in Düsseldorf since January 2012 and organizes events in different cultural areas (film, literature, music, theater, etc.) with a focus on the Czech Republic.
Evelyn Sturl
Evelyn Sturl (*1991) studies in Graz. After she completed her Bachelor of Arts degree in „Transcultural Communication“, she continued her intensive studies of languages and cultures by continuing to gain a Master of Arts in “Translation“ in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian and Italian. Her initial curiosity about the Southeast European area turned into genuine interest, which essentially turned into a love for Serbo-Croatian. From her numerous visits to Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia as well as relevant internships such as her work at the Austrijski Institut (Austrian Institute) in Belgrade, for instance, her passion for the literature of the ex-Yugoslavian countries grew.
Franziska Mazi
Franziska Mazi studied Slavic and English Studies at the University of Basel with a focus on Southern Slavic Studies and completed a semester abroad in St. Petersburg and Split. Since 2013 she writes for a cultural magazine in Basel and engages in smaller translation activities into German and English. Since April of 2013 she is a member of the TransStar translation group for Slovenian-German under the leadership of Daniela Kocmut. Her current translation project is the novel by Goran Vojnović Jugoslavija, moja dežela (2012).
Constanze Aka
Constanze Aka currently studies East European Studies at Free University in Berlin, combining the subjects of culture and history. Before that she completed her Bachelor of Arts in European Studies at the University of Passau and conducted a little detour into the world of cultural and educational project organization. She spent two semesters as a student and volunteer at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv and travels a lot, especially in Brazil, Poland, Russia and Ukraine.
Marlena Breuer
After finishing her final secondary school examination (Abitur) Marlena Breuer (*1985) completed her vocational training in carpentry and worked as an instrument maker. Since 2009 she studies Slavic Studies at the University of Tübingen. In the course of her studies and within the framework of the project Textabdrücke – literarisches Übersetzen [Textual Impressions – Literary Translation] at the University of Tübingen, she discovered her passion for translating literary texts, first from Russian and later from Polish. In the fall of 2012 under the tutelage of Andreas Tretner the translation of a fairy tale, The Gluttonous Shoe by Aleksey Tolstoy, came into being and is waiting to be published.
You can find further information on the project, updated regularly, under: www.transstar-europa.org or on our facebook site transstar-europa.
The newsletter in the each of the languages can be downloaded here:
Czech
Polish
Slovenian
Ukrainian
Croatian
