Newsletter 04/2014
We hope that everybody had a pleasant summer; now we look forward to continuing the TransStar Europa project in fall of 2014.
In this newsletter you will find
Fall 2014 Events
Current publications
Project „Pinhole Camera“
Translator of the month
Diamond Cut – Literary translator contest in Poland
Fall 2014 Events
Lviv Book Fair
From 11 to 14 September the Publishers’ Forum, which is the most important book fair in Ukraine, will take place in Lviv. Despite the difficult political and social circumstances arising from the Russian invasion of the Eastern part of the country, Ukrainian publishers and authors are nonetheless determined to present the most important new releases and provide some room for literature with an extensive program of events. The EU project TransStar Europa will also be represented at the book fair in Lviv. On 11 September at 5 p.m. Maria Ivanytska will moderate the event titled “Translators Going to the Barricades: A Protesting Civil Society”. She will speak with Andrij Bondar, the founder of the information and translation service called eurolution, and with Claudia Dathe, the co-editor of Majdan! Ukraine, Europe, about forms of civil society protests translators are engaging in.
Translation Workshops in September
From the 24th until the 28th of September TransStar participants will meet for their second translator workshop. Under the leadership of Yurko Prokhasko, Amalija Maček and Claudia Dathe the German-Ukrainian, the German-Slovenian and the Ukrainian-German groups will continue their work in Stuttgart. The German-Polish, the Polish-German, the German-Czech and the Czech-German groups will meet in Ustí nad Labem with their workshop leaders Sława Lisiecka, Olaf Kühl, Radovan Charvát and Kristina Kallert. In Zagreb the Slovenian-German, the German-Croatian and the Croatian-German groups will meet and work with their leaders Erwin Köstler, Andy Jelčić and Matthias Jacob. While the workshops are taking place, literary events catered towards the public will be also be held.
Aller Liebe Anfang [The Beginning of all Love] – Translating Cube in Stuttgart
Following the last activities in Cracow this past January, the translating cube of the EU project TransStar Europa will now come to Stuttgart. From the 24th until the 28th of September authors, translators, performance artists and musicians from five different European countries will meet and with their performances will weave a web of European literary, translatory, musical and performative arts.
Judith Hermann will start off the series of public events on 24 September as she will read from her new novel called Aller Liebe Anfang [The Beginning of all Love] and talk with her Ukrainian translator Yurko Prokhasko about the reading of literature on this side of Central Europe and beyond. On 25 September the audience will travel to Poland and visit the renown Polish author Olga Tokarczuk. In her role as moderator Alida Bremer, an expert on the Balkans and herself an author, will engage in dialogue with Tokarczuk and talk with her about her thriller entitled Der Gesang der Fledermäuse [The Sound of Bats]. On the following day the audience will have the opportunity to discover the art of translation from a variety of perspectives. In addition to a Shakespearean translation performance by Frank Günther visitors will also be able to watch video poetics by the Ukrainian author and video artist Kateryna Babkina, listen to a translation installation by Ulrike Almut Sandig on her text Salzwasser [Salt Water], be able to collect spectacular questions about translation and will see photos made with a pinhole camera on the topic of “Places of Translation” by participants in the EU project. On 27 September the “boldest voice of the younger generation of the Ukrainian literary szene” (Neue Zürcher Zeitung) Serhiy Zhadan and his band „Sobaky v kosmosi“ will perform ska music with poems about the everyday in Ukraine using a mixture of post-soviet mechanisms, ubiquitous corruption and a virtuous art of improvisation. The festival will be concluded on Sunday with a salon reading with Slovenian, Ukrainian and German participants of the EU project, moderated by the Slovenian author and translator Amalija Maček.
More detailed information on events, times and admission prices you can find online under http://transstar-europa.org/category/events/translation_cubes/ or http://www.literaturhaus-stuttgart.de/.
The project Translating Cube: Six Sides of European Literature and Translation is sponsored by the Federal Foundation for Culture, the Robert Bosch Foundation and by the Program for Lifelong Learning of the European Union.
Karl-Markus Gauss and Zoran Ferić in Zagreb
On 25 September 2014 Zoran Ferić, one of the most popular contemporary Croatian authors and columnists, and his translator Klaus Detlef Olof as well as the well-known author, essayist, critic and editor of the journal Literatur und Kritik [Literature and Critique], Karl-Markus Gauss from Salzburg will perform together with his translator Boris Perić. Gauss will also read from his novel Die sterbenden Europäer [Dying Europeans] for which he was awarded the Albert Goldstein Prize. The event will be moderated by Dr. Milka Car Prijić, the head of the Department of German Studies at the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Zagreb.
A Reading with Radka Denemarková in Ustí nad Labem
Within the framework of the second TransStar translation workshop an event with the Czech author Radka Denemarková will be held at the Collegium Bohemicum on 26 September at 8 p.m. During her reading and subsequent discussion the author will talk about her writing activities within the context of the current Czech literature.
Current Publications
In the August edition of the journal LICHTUNGEN more translations of the TransStar participants were published.
Kateřina Ringesová translated the short story The Concert by Michal Ajvaz from the Czech language. The Croatian author Dalibor Šimpraga will be introduced with his short story called No One Else is Controlled translated by Vivian Kellenberger. Jakob Walosczyk will present an excerpt from the novel Insatiable Things by the Polish author Andrzej Czcibor-Piotrowski. We will read an excerpt from the essay Lviv: Sequences of a Psychosis by Yuriy Izdryk which has been translated from Ukrainian into German by Stefan Heck. Anja Wutej, who translates from Slovenian into German, has translated an excerpt from the novel Love in the Air by Yani Virk. The excerpts are accessible online under http://transstar-europa.org/category/events/translation/.
Project „Pinhole Camera“
For several years the photo artist Przemek Zajfert has been working on an interesting project called Camera Obscura. The objective is to take pictures of interesting objects with a simple pinhole camera and as a result obtain artistic impressions. Inspired by his idea the TransStar team of has asked project participants and workshop leaders to use the pinhole camera and capture a place they associate closely with their own translation activity. Very beautiful images have already been created and uploaded which you can look at online under http://www.zajfert.de/der_7_tag/archiv/index.php?/category/60. In a next step texts based on these images and on one’s own translation work will also be generated.
Translator of the Month for August and September
In August you will be able to read a portrait of the Ukrainian author Mykola Lukash which highlights his difficult circumstances during the times of the Soviet system. In September you will find an interview with the Croatian translator Latica Bilopavlović Vuković, who translates contemporary German authors such as Daniel Kehlmann, Ilma Rakusa and Zsuzsa Bánk into Croatian. In the interview she divulges her very own and unique process of translating texts. You will be able to find these articles online under http://transstar-europa.org/latica-bilopavlovic-vukovic/. The next portrait will be published at the beginning of October.
Diamond Cut – Literary Translator Contest in Poland
The Goethe Institute in Warsaw and Cracow, the Austrian Cultural Forum in Warsaw, the Polish Institute in Berlin and the Department of German, Austrian and Swiss Literature and Culture at the University of Lodz are organizing a contest to find the best translation of a German and Austrian text into Polish. The contest is directed at prospective literary translators who have already published some of their translations. The contestants should choose two from four selected prose texts, translate these texts and send them to the following address: konkurs@literatur.pl. The deadline is the 15th of November 2014. Further information on the contest and texts to be translated you can find under www.literatur.pl. Winners will be awarded two fellowships, belletristic texts and publications in the electronic version of the journal RADAR.
Translators in LICHTUNGEN
Kateřyna Ringesová
Katka Ringesová was born in 1980 in Planá, studied and worked in Pilsen and Regensburg and in 2011 she moved to Berlin. There she takes care of translations and lonely hearts in the online sector and is a teacher for children from German-Czech families (Mateřídouška e. V.). Translation enables her to discover beautiful pictures in seemingly simple texts and through the work with language she is able to find her own way of expression. The first step in this expedition has been taken, i.e., the translation of František Langer’s My Brother Jiří, others will follow.
Jakob Walosczyk
Jakob Walosczyk, born in 1981, translates from the Polish and Russian languages. He was born in Silesia and Swabia and has called Franconia his home for some time now. He nonetheless only speaks High German. Since he graduated with a degree in Slavic and English Studies he works as a docent for German as a Second Language and lives in Bamberg.
Vivian Kellenberger
Vivian Alida Kellenberger (born 1978) studied Slavic and Eastern European Studies at the universities of Fribourg, Bern, Moscow (RGGU) and Zagreb. She has translated for delegations of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Bosnia Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia and worked as a translator for the Embassy of the Republic of Croatia in Bern for several years. Since 2009 she teaches Croatian at private language schools in Zurich and Bern and since 2011 she works at the Institute for Slavic Languages and Literatures in Bern, where she also organises readings with authors from the former Yugoslavia. Der Stein und der Hund [The Rock and the Dog]. Ćamil Sijarić (from Serbo-Croatian by Vivian Kellenberger). Variations. Literaturzeitschrift der Universität Zürich. „Diskontinuität“. 15/2007. S. 259-266.
Anja Wutej
Anja Wutej grew up bilingual, speaking Slovenian and German. She completed her university studies at the Department of Translational Studies of the Faculty of Humanities (University of Ljubljana) and after that studied at the Faculty of Security (University of Maribor). During her studies she was awarded a number of stipends (Erasmus, DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) the Slovienian National Zois Stipend for talented students) and spent a semester in Lisbon and a month in Berlin. She also participated in different projects (translations for HALMA, Poetikon and the University Cultural Center UNIKUM in Klagenfurt). In her spare time she is an actor, a film director, singer and loves to do crafts.
Stefan Heck
Stefan Heck was born in 1987 in São Paulo, Brazil, and since 1990 he lives in Germany. In Tübingen and Warsaw he studied Slavic Studies and Business Administration. In addition to his main language, which is Polish, he fell in love with Ukrainian during a summer course in 2009. Since 2013 he is a research assistant at the Department of Slavic Studies at the University of Tübingen where he is completing his doctoral thesis on the aspect in Slavic languages.
For further information on translation, the TransStar project and the Translating Cube please go to the following link: http://transstar-europa.org.
Funded by the Programme for Lifelong Learning
of the European Union
The newsletter in the each of the languages can be downloaded here:
Ukrainian
Slowenian
Polnish
Croatian
Czech