Lecture on self-translation and Shoah Literature

Fransiska Louwagie (Université de Louvain) will give a lecture on "Témoignage et réécriture: Les écrivains de la Shoah en français et l’autotraduction" on Monday, November 29 at 6:00 p.m. at the Barker Center, Room 133 in Cambridge. For more information see the Anthropology Graduate Program at Harvard University.

Self-translation from indigenous languages

Last week I attended the first international conference on self-translation in Pescara, Italy. There I had the chance to meet Julio-César Santoyo, who has been researching on self-translation for many years. During our talk, he made me aware of self-translation from indigenous languages, an aspect of self-translation I had completely ignored till that day. He was so kind to give me a copy of a presentation he gave last year in Canada on this topic as a starting point for my own research. Back in Germany I now started researching. It is a really fascinating field.
Today I would like to present you a Mayan writer and self-translator: Humberto Ak'abal. He was born in 1953 in Momostenango, Guatemala. He writes his poetry in Quiché and translates it into Spanisch. His poems are published in bilingual editions. Some of his work has been translated from the Spanish version into English, German and other languages.

For further reading and listening:

• Presentation of the author by Mariolein Sabarte Belacortu
• Presentation of the author and the book "Drum Stone", a trilingual edition of selected poems. With the possibility to see inside the book.
• Podcast from a lecture with his english translators given at the Ullapool Book Festival 2010
• Erich Hakl on his German translation "Trommel aus Stein" (in German)
• Article in L'Express (15/10/2010): Humberto Ak'abal: hymnes, lamentos et tambours de pierre (in French)
  

Alexakis book presentation in Tours, France

Vassilis Alexakis will present his new book Le premier mot this thursday, 18th November, at the Libraire La boîte à Livres in Tours, France.

Lectures by Thiong'o in November

The African self-translator Ngugi Wa Thiong'o will speak on several occasions in November 2010.

On November 20, 2010 at 3:30pm he will speak at the Chapman Conference Center in Miami about Dreams in a Time of War: A Childhood Memoir. This lecture is part of the Miami Book Fair international.

He will also give a lecture at the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum at Claremont McKenna College on Monday, November 29, 2010 from 6:45 pm till 8:00 pm.
For more information see the newsletter The Fortnightly.

Federman and Beckett...

both self-translators and friends. In his wonderful memorial essay samuel beckett: the gift of words, written shortly after Beckett's death, Raymond Federman shares his memories and gives us insight into their friendship and Becketts struggle with his self-translations. Please read the essay here..

The 6th International Postgraduate Conference in Translation and Interpreting

will take place this weekend at the University in Manchester.
The program is available here.
There is one contribution on self-translation:
"Theory and Practice of Self-Translation in the Case of Rosario Ferré"
Aurora Sambolín (University of Manchester, UK)

The Curious Case of Translating One’s Own Literary Work

... was the title of a panel on self-translation at the 33rd Annual Conference of the American Literary Translators Association which took place last week (October 20-23) in Philadelphia.
Speakers were:
Willis Barnstone, “Freedoms and Worries in Translating My Book of French Poems into English”
Wei Shao, “Translating My Memoir Homeland from English to Chinese”
Shouhua Qi, “The Curious Case of Literary Self-Translation”

If anyone reading this blog attended the conference, I would love to hear more about it.

Lecture on self-translation

There will be a series of lectures on translation organized for MA students in literary translation in Utrecht, Netherlands. It is also possible for non-students to come, but you have to register beforehand. One of the lectures will focus on self-translation:

• Self translation
  • Spreker: Fransiska Louwagie
  • Datum & tijd: 12 mei 2011, 15:30-17:30
  • Locatie: Lessius, Antwerpen, (STA.2.11)
  • Aanmelden: uiterlijk 11 april 2011

For more information, please click here.

An Interactive Festival of Literary Translation

... will take place under the title "Translated" in Melbourne, Australia next year at the Monash University. From February 7–12, 2011 there will be workshops, talks and panel discussions in French, German and Spanish.

There will also be an afternoon session on self-translation:
"Lia Hills and Ouyang Yu, both writers, translators and poets, will provide an insight into the advantages and pitfalls of self-translation."

For more information, please click here.

Nobel prize for Thiong'o?

Will it be another Nobel prize for a self-translator?
Soon we will know.
For more information check out the article in the Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/oct/05/kenyan-nobel-prize-literature

Indication of self-translation

Rarely one finds a discussion in the press about the habit in the publishing industry to present self-translated books as originals with no reference to the other version. So I found it quite interesting that in her review of the new book by Thiong'o in the Guardian, Maya Jaggi recently drew the readers' attention to the fact that Dreams in a Time of War is in fact a self-translation from the Gikuyu although it is not mentioned in the book. She finds this quite disturbing as in the past Thiong'o "has said that the most beautiful line in Wizard of the Crow, his satire on dictatorship, is: "A translation from Gikuyu by the author." (Jaggi 2010). So what has changed since then?

For further reading:
Maya Jaggi (2010): Dreams in a Time of War by Ngugi wa Thiong'o. In: Guardian, 03.07.2010. Online available here. In the last paragraph she discusses the issue of self-translation.