Monday, June 15, 2009
Greek self-translators
During my research on Vassilis Alexakis today, I found a very interesting article published 25.1o.2007 in the English edition of the newspaper Kathimerini about a conference with five Greek authors who write in a foreign language. Three of them are self-translators. One of them of course was Vassilis Alexakis, the other two were Panos Karnezis and Theodor Kallifatides.
Panos Karnezis was born in 1967 in Greece and has been living in England since 1992. He writes in English and translates his books into Greek. Theodor Kallifatidis was born in 1938 in Greece and has been living in Sweden since 1963. He writes in Swedish and rewrites his books in Greek.
For further reading:
Literary encounters that span different languages. Five cosmopolitan Greek writers share their thoughts with a packed Athenian audience. In Kathimerini English Edition. 25.10.2007.
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2 comments:
Hi, I like your blog posts and I find them pretty interesting. I wish you the best of luck with your research. Can you please write a bit on the major reasons why people want to translate their own works? It should be more than the fact that they could probably not find someone who qualified to do that for them. Cheers!
Hello thank you very much, nice to get some feedback. I will write soon a longer blog post about the different reasons but the main reasons are:
- reaching a wider audience especially for self-translator who write in a minority language like catalan
- sense of only feeling the work is only completed if exists in the two languages
- some also write the two works simultanously and translating helps them to find the weak points and so while translating they improve the other version and so the two versions exist finished before even one is published thats why often it is hard to tell which version was the first one or it doesn't really exist an "original" version.
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