Round table with Vassilis Alexakis

Today is Vassilis Alexakis birthday, so all my best wishes to him. Next chance to meet him will be tomorrow in Paris, where he will be one of the participants of a round table on translation and multilingualism.

Round Table: Traduction et multilinguisme
Date: December, 13, 2011 at 10 am
Place: Collège de France, Paris.

The round table is part of a conference on "Diplomatie culturelle" which will take place today and tomorrow. For more information and to follow a live stream of the entire conference, please click here.

New collection of essays on self-translation

At the conference on self-translation in Perpigan Xosé Manuel Dasilva and Helena Tanqueiro presented a new collection of essays on self-translation, Aproximaciones a la autotraducción, which they both have edited. The book includes contributions among many others by Maria Alice Antunes, Rainier Grutman. Patricia López López-Gay, Valentina Mercuri, Francesc Parcerisas and Julió-César Santoyo. All articles are written in Spanish. To see the list of articles published in the book, please click here.
I especially look forward to read the article on basque self-translation by Elizabete Manterola Agirrezabalaga, who talked about Atxaga's self-translation at the conference in Perpignan. Due to parallel sessions I couldn't attend her talk, so I am looking forward to at least read about her research.


Xosé Manuel Dasilva  y  Helena Tanqueiro (eds.): Aproximaciones a la autotraducción 2011, 262 pp. / 49,00 € ISBN 978-84-15175-18-6a

Impressions from the Perpignan Conference on self-translation

If you missed the conference on self-translation in Perpignan in October, you can read about it in a blog entry (written in French) by Jean-Rene Lasalle, poet and self-translator, who participated in the multilingual round table on self-translation with Francesc Paresias, Philippe Gardy and Antoni Marí. Some contributions of the conference will be published in conference proceedings.

Reasons against self-translation

In an interview with the New York Times the trilingual playwright Jonas Hassen Khemiri’ explains why he opted against self-translating his play from Swedish to English: “It’s almost impossible to translate your own words,” he said. “You need someone who’s a bit rough with the text, who can challenge it and take it for a ride.”

Lecture on Nabokov

Olga Anokhina will give a lecture on Nabokov's trilingual writing on Friday, March 9, 2012 in Paris.

Title: « Traduction et ré-écriture chez Vladimir Nabokov : genèse d’une œuvre en trois langues »
Place: 59/61 rue POUCHET 75017 Paris, 3ème étage. Salle 311
Date: Friday, March 9, 2012

Source: http://www.item.ens.fr/index.php?id=578079

Lecture on Beckett's Mercier et Camier

Chiara Montini will give a lecture on Beckett's self-translation in the case of "Mercier et Camier" on Friday, May 11, 2012 in Paris.

Title: « Ecriture en langue étrangère, autotraduction et traduction. Genèse et réception d'un texte bilingue. Le cas de "Mercier et Camier" de Samuel Beckett »
Place: 59/61 rue POUCHET 75017 Paris, 3ème étage. Salle 311
Date: Friday, May 11, 2012

Source: http://www.item.ens.fr/index.php?id=578079
 

Self-translation in the Caribbean

For those of you, who are working on self-translation in the Caribbean, the call for papers "Translating the Caribbean" by Small Axe might be interesting:

"We invite contributors working in any of the languages of the Caribbean to participate in a generative conversation surrounding translation and the real and imagined multiculturalism of the Americas in papers that might address (among other topics):

• language(s) in/and/of exile – class, travel, and writing from the Caribbean
• francophonie in/and Haiti
• multilinguality, scholarship, and pedagogy in Caribbean Studies
• the viability and legitimacy of a designated lingua franca in the Caribbean
• the relevance of translation to issues of (il)literacy
• the place of Creole(s) in scholarship of the Caribbean
• translation and the literary history of the Caribbean
• translation in Caribbean cultural theory
• translation and the history of Caribbean journals
• the limitations of translation: what is untranslatable in the transcolonial Caribbean?

Abstracts of 250-300 words and short bios should be sent to submissions@smallaxe.net by 15 December 2011. Accepted abstracts will be confirmed by 15 January 2012. Final papers of no more than 6000 words must be submitted 31 May 2012." (source: http://repeatingislands.com/2011/11/03/call-for-papers-translating-the-caribbean-in-small-axe/)

Michael Idov

Nearly 2 years ago I posted a link to a blogpost by Michael Idov, in which he wrote about his experience of self-translating his novel Ground up. Two years later his self-translation is now announced to be a topic at the 2012 AATSEEL Conference which will take place in January 2012 in Seattle:
January 6, 1:45pm-3:30pm
6C-5 Panel: Slavic Culture and Translation
Panelist: Adrian Wanner, Pennsylvania State U
Title: From Ground Up to Kofemolka: Michael Idov’s Self-Translation 

Journée d'étude Alexakis - Un romancier entre deux cultures

A journée d'étude on Vassilis Alexakis will take place in Amiens, France on Friday 25 November. Now the program has been published. There will be 5 talks during the day, 2 focusing on self-translation:

• Ligia Ferreira - Sao Paulo : « Migrations littéraires : auto-traduction et dialogues interculturels entre le sujet auteur et ses langues : le cas de Vassilis Alexakis »
• Alain Ausoni - Oxford :: « Une explication avec la langue française : autobiographie et translinguisme chez Vassilis Alexakis»

Vassilis Alexakis will be present at the end of the journée d'étude at 4 pm. The event takes place at the Bibliothèque Louis Aragon, Rue de la République, Amiens, France.

The Black Hat: On Self-Translation and Freedom

Just the other day I was trying to find self-translations from Inuit languages, but I was not successful. A few minutes ago, I found a blogpost by Olafur Gunnarsson, who apparently self-translates between Icelandic and English. Although Icelandic is not an Inuit language, my list of self-translators now reached the North....
So if you are interested, in what Olafur Gunnarsson has to tell about the black hat and his experience as a self-translator, please visit the wonderful blog WordsWithoutBorders.

Conference "Le choix du vulgaire : france, Italie, Espagne (XIIIe-XVI siècles)"

Self-translation will be a topic at the Conference "Le choix du vulgaire : france, Italie, Espagne (XIIIe-XVI siècles)" taking place at Paris, France from 17.11.2011 - 18.11.2011.

The whole session on Friday morning is dedicated to self-translation:
Pratiques de l’auto-traduction

• 9h30-10h00 : Lucia Bertolini, (Université de Florence) : « Latino-volgare e viceversa : le autotraduzioni a Firenze fra XV e XVI ».
• 10h45-11h15 : Jean-Pierre Jardin, (Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle) : « De la Regum Hispanorum Anacephaleosis (1456) à la Genealogía de los Reyes (1463) : deux projets pour une seule oeuvre ? ».
• 11h30-12h : Marie-Christine Gomez-Géraud (Université de Paris Ouest Nanterre-La Défense) : « Du latin au français, du dialogue au récit de pèlerinage : Jean du Blioul et son entreprise d’auto-traduction à la fin du XVIe siècle »

For more information on the conference, please click here.