Past Translation Days

Friday 9th June

17:15–19:00

Alejandro Zambra in conversation with Megan McDowell

Seminar Room 10, St Anne's College

Award-winning translator Megan McDowell discusses her recent translations of Alejandro Zambra's work—including Chilean Poet, shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize—with the author himself. This conversation will be chaired by Ben Bollig.

Alejandro Zambra is a Chilean writer, author of two books of poems, Bahía Inútil and Mudanza; two collections of essays, No leer and Tema libre; and seven works of fiction, including short story collections Mis documentos and Skyscrapers and novels Bonsái, La vida privada de los árboles, Formas de volver a casa, Facsímil, and Poeta chileno. The recipient of numerous literary prizes, as well as a New York Public Library Cullman Center fellowship, he has published fiction and essays in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and Harper’s Magazine, among other publications. He lives in Mexico City.

Megan McDowell has translated books by many contemporary South American and Spanish authors, including seven of Alejandro Zambra's works—Bonsai, The Private Lives of Trees, Ways of Going Home, My Documents, Multiple Choice, Not To Read, and Chilean Poet (shortlisted for the 2023 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize). In 2022, she won the National Book Award for Translated Fiction for her translation of Samanta Schweblin's Seven Empty Houses. Her translations have been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Words Without Borders, and Vice, among other publications. She lives in Chile.

Saturday 10th June

11:30–13:00

Japanese Translation Workshop with Polly Barton and Aoko Matsuda, in partnership with the Queen’s College Translation Exchange

Seminar Room 8, St Anne's College

This workshop, led by the award-winning authors and translators Aoko Matsuda and Polly Barton, will explore some of the challenges of translating between Japanese and English. Considering various approaches, we will collaboratively translate a text from Japanese into English, with no prior knowledge of Japanese required. This workshop is the final event of Aoko Matsuda and Polly Barton's joint translation residency at the Queen’s College, Oxford, and will be a unique opportunity to engage in dialogue with both writer and translator while exploring what it means to translate contemporary Japanese literature today.

Aoko Matsuda is a writer and translator. In 2013, her debut book, Stackable, was nominated for the Mishima Yukio Prize and the Noma Literary New Face Prize. In 2019, her short story ‘The Woman Dies’ was shortlisted for a Shirley Jackson Award. In 2021, her short story collection Where the Wild Ladies Are, translated by Polly Barton and published by Tilted Axis Press, was selected as one of the 10 Best Fiction Book of 2020 by TIME, and won and World Fantasy Award for Best Collection in 2021. She has translated work by Karen Russell, Amelia Gray and Carmen Maria Machado into Japanese.

Polly Barton is a writer and translator of Japanese literature and non-fiction, based in Bristol. In 2019, she was awarded the Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize for her non-fiction debut Fifty Sounds (Fitzcarraldo Editions/Liveright), and has just released her second non-fiction work with Fitzcarraldo, Porn: An Oral History (2023). In 2021, her translation of Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda (Tilted Axis Press/Soft Skull Press, 2020) won the World Fantasy Award for Best Collection.

‘Translating Gender’: French Translation Workshop with Jenny Higgins

Seminar Room 9, St Anne's College

One of the first things we learn about the French language is that the nouns have genders: the sea is ‘feminine’ but a boat is ‘masculine’. We usually translate these with a neutralising ‘the’, but what do we do when writers use gender to create a specific effect, or to ask questions about the way we use language? It can be one of those moments when translation starts to feel impossible, and the dictionary’s no help… In this collaborative workshop, we will have a go at translating texts, from classic to contemporary, by writers who have played with the possibilities of gendered language. Some knowledge of French (AS-level or above) will be useful.

Jenny Higgins translates from French and Italian. She has translated a range of novels, short stories and non-fiction, and recently produced the first translation of Jean Lorrain’s play, Ennoïa. Her recent translations include Faces on the Tip of my Tongue by Emmanuelle Pagano (Peirene Press, 2019)—which was longlisted for the International Booker Prize—and The Photographer of Auschwitz by Luca Crippa and Maurizio Onnis (Doubleday, 2021).

‘Translating Modernisms’: Portuguese Translation Workshop with Rahul Berry, in partnership with the Stephen Spender Trust

Seminar Room 11, St Anne's College

In this workshop we will go back to 1927, year of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, the final instalment of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and the Brazilian modernist Oswald de Andrade’s Primeiro Caderno do Alumno de Poesia. Playful, iconoclastic, boldly experimental, Oswald’s work was a heady fusion of high and low art. As we work together to translate a poem from this collection, we will consider how Brazilian modernism can be translated into English, and look at different ways of approaching a translation of this kind, from the faithful to the not-so-faithful! No prior knowledge of Portuguese is required. This workshop is presented in collaboration with the Stephen Spender Trust and the Queen’s College Translation Exchange. The Stephen Spender Prize for poetry in translation is now open for entries from across the world: translate any poem out of any language into English. Read more about the Stephen Spender Prize here.

Rahul Bery is based in Cardiff and translates from Spanish and Portuguese. His most recent translations are Nothing Can Hurt You Now by Simone Campos (Pushkin Press, 2023) and Mary John by Ana Pessoa (Archipélago Press, 2022, co-translated with Daniel Hahn). He is currently working on books by Vicente Luís Mora and José Henrique Bortoluci. He was the British Library’s translator in residence from 2018–2019 and he does outreach work with the Stephen Spender Trust and the Translation Exchange at Queen’s College, Oxford University.

14:00–15:15

Translating Punctuation: A Roundtable Discussion

Seminar Room 7, St Anne’s College

In many languages, punctuation marks abound in written texts. But when does an exclamation point indicate emphasis or a scream? When is a semi-colon a pause or a question? What these typographical signs mean and how they shape our reading of a text differ significantly across languages and scripts. This roundtable will gather poets, translators, and poet-translators working in Hebrew, Japanese, French, Spanish, and Chinese (among other languages) for a lively discussion on the translation and translatability of punctuation.

Adriana X. Jacobs is Associate Professor of Modern Hebrew Literature at the University of Oxford and author of Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry (University of Michigan Press, 2018). Her translations of contemporary Hebrew poetry include Vaan Nguyen’s The Truffle Eye (Zephyr Press, 2021), for which she was awarded the 2022 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Merav Givoni Hrushovski's End— (Carrion Bloom Books, 2023).

Shira Stav is Associate Professor in the Department of Hebrew Literature at Ben-Gurion University. She has been a research fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies in Philadephia, the Taube Center for Jewish Studies at Stanford University, among others. Stav is an award-winning poet, whose work has been translated into English, German, and Arabic. Her translations into Hebrew include collections by Sharon Olds (The Floor of Our Life, 2017) and by Ocean Vuong (The Last Prom Queen in Antarctica, 2023), as well as Hebrew translations of poetry by Margaret Atwood, Louise Glück, Carolyn Forché, Robert Bly, and many others.

Juliana Buriticá Alzate is Departmental Lecturer in Modern Japanese Literature at the University of Oxford. Her research brings together queer and feminist theory to explore representations of mothering and related embodied experiences in contemporary Japanese fiction. She has translated Aoko Matsuda’s Where The Wild Ladies Are into Spanish (Quaterni, 2022) and is currently working on a collection of poetry by Hiromi Itō, forthcoming in 2023 by Insensata.

Coraline Jortay is the Laming Junior Research Fellow at The Queen’s College, Oxford, and a translator of Sinophone fiction and poetry into French. Her recent book-length translations include Le Banquet aphrodisiaque by Li Ang (L’Asiathèque, forthcoming 2023) and Les Sentiers des rêves by Walis Nokan (L’Asiathèque, 2018). In 2014, she was awarded the second and third prize of the China International Translation Contest. A co-editor with Gwennaël Gaffric of the anthology Hong Kong (Jentayu, 2022), she has translated short fiction and poetry from Taiwan and Hong Kong for a range of literary magazines, including Jentayu, Lettres de Malaisie, and Graminées.

15:45–17:00

Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry in Translation: Iryna Starovoyt in conversation with Grace Mahoney

Seminar Room 7, St Anne’s College

We celebrate the Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series published by Lost Horse Press with a conversation between Ukrainian poet Iryna Starovoyt and translator and series editor Grace Mahoney. The series features dual-language editions of poetry from Ukraine’s most significant contemporary poets. These critically acclaimed and award-winning books showcase the diversity of poets who write from a range of geographies, poetic perspectives, and literary movements. Of critical importance is the fact that many of the poems featured in this series meditate on the significance of Ukraine’s independence and the positionality of the poet in a literature-centred culture in times of war. This conversation will be chaired by Matthew Reynolds.

Iryna Starovoyt is a poet and a cultural studies scholar, Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at the Ukrainian Catholic University, and a Visiting Fellow at St Anne's College, Oxford. A member of PEN Ukraine, she is the author of three volumes of poetry and a number of essays. She has published widely on Ukrainian literary narratives of becoming and belonging, and serves as the Head of the Jury for the transnational literary prize for UNESCO’s City of Literature based in Lviv.

Grace Mahoney is a PhD candidate specialising in Russian and Ukrainian languages and literatures at the University of Michigan. She also practices literary translation. Her book of translations of Iryna Starovoyt's poetry A Field of Foundlings was published by Lost Horse Press in 2017 as the first volume in a series of Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry for which she now serves as editor.

17:00–18:15

“This is Why”: Translators on Translating

Seminar Room 7, St Anne's College

Join acclaimed literary translators who have featured on prestigious shortlists and longlists to hear more about their translation practices and choices. They will discuss a short poem or passage that they have recently translated, and give the audience insight into the “hows” and “whys” of their approach.

DRINKS RECEPTION
 

18:30–20:00

Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize Short List Readings and Prize-Giving 

Tsuzuki Lecture Theatre, St Anne’s College

The Oxford–Weidenfeld Prize is for book-length literary translations into English from any living European language. It aims to honour the craft of translation, and to recognise its cultural importance. It was founded by Lord Weidenfeld and is supported by New College, The Queen’s College, and St Anne’s College, Oxford. This celebration of literary translation will feature readings from the work of the shortlisted translators, and the presentation of the prize.

DINNER

Friday 10th June

17:15–19:00

Geoffrey Brock in conversation with Nicola Gardini

Seminar Room 11, St Anne's College

This year's Oxford Translation Day kicks off with a Friday evening event in which Geoffrey Brock discusses, together with Professor Nicola Gardini, both his recent translations (Giovanni Pascoli, Giusuppe Ungaretti) and current projects (Vivian Lamarque, Umberto Saba, Chantal Montellier). The discussion will be chaired by Marta Arnaldi.

Geoffrey Brock is the author of three books of poems, the editor of The FSG Book of 20th-Century Italian Poetry, and the translator of a dozen books of poetry, prose, and comics, mostly from Italian. He has received many translation awards in the US, most recently the 2021 National Translation Award in Poetry for Allegria, his versions of Giuseppe Ungaretti's World War I poems. A Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing and Literary Translation at the University of Arkansas, he is currently a Visiting Fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge, where he is translating collections by Vivian Lamarque and Umberto Saba.

Nicola Gardini is a prize-winning novelist, poet, essayist, and translator of poetry from English, Latin, and ancient Greek, and the author of numerous books. His Long Live Latin, an essay on the beauty and importance of Latin, became an international best-seller. His memoir Nicolas appeared just a few weeks ago: a portrait of his beloved husband, who died at the beginning of 2020. His novel Le parole perdute di Amelia Lynd appeared in English as Lost Words (transl. Michael Moore). He is Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Keble College.  

Marta Arnaldi studied comparative literature and medicine at Turin, Pavia, and Oxford. She is currently the Stipendiary Lecturer in Italian at St Anne’s College and an Extraordinary Junior Research Fellow at The Queen’s College, University of Oxford. Arnaldi leads an international research programme called Translating Illness. She is the prize-winning author of three poetry collections (Itaca, Mare storto and Intraducibile), and of a forthcoming monograph: The Diasporic Canon: American Anthologies of Contemporary Italian Poetry 1945-2015. She is also a trained ballet dancer (Royal Academy of Dance). 

Saturday 11th June

11:30–13:00

French Translation Workshop with Jenny Higgins: Translating Atmosphere

Seminar Room 8, St Anne's College

In this workshop we’ll think about one of the most interesting challenges for literary translators: capturing a particular atmosphere or mood. We’ll translate extracts from a variety of French texts, working collaboratively and discussing different ways of bringing their various atmospheres into English. Participants will ideally need AS-level French or above.

Jenny Higgins translates from French and Italian. She has translated a range of novels, short stories and non-fiction, and recently produced the first translation of Jean Lorrain’s 1906 play, Ennoïa. She has also translated Emmanuelle Pagano, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam and Rachilde, and has forthcoming projects with Wakefield Press and Les Fugitives.

German Translation Workshop with Jen Calleja: 'We only translated one sentence...’

Seminar Room 10, St Anne's College

In this workshop, we will collaborate on translating the opening line from a contemporary German-language novel, exploring every angle necessary in the translation of just a single line, while navigating the concerns and approaches required to translate literature in general. We will also take a look at how famous opening lines in literature have been translated and retranslated, and have a poetic warm up exercise. You never know, maybe we’ll also get around to translating the second line of the novel... Knowledge of German is not absolutely required for this workshop.

Jen Calleja is a writer and literary translator based in Hastings. Her books include I’m Afraid That’s All We’ve Got Time For (Prototype, 2020) and Goblins (Rough Trade Books, 2020), and she writes a column on translation for the Brixton Review of Books. She has translated German-language authors including Wim Wenders, Kerstin Hensel, Gregor Hens, Michelle Steinbeck and Raphaela Edelbauer, and has been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize and the Schlegel-Tieck Prize. She is a PhD candidate at UEA working on a creative-critical project exploring literary translators’ memoirs, and runs Praspar Press with Kat Storace.

Hindi Translation Workshop with Mohini Gupta: Translating Images and Metaphors

Seminar Room 7, St Anne's College

In this workshop, we will collaboratively translate a Hindi poem into English, with a focus on translating images and metaphors. The poem lends itself to multiple interpretations because of its simultaneous simplicity in language and complexity in meaning. How do translators navigate difficult translation decisions in the face of such 'untranslatables'? No prior knowledge of Hindi required.

Mohini Gupta is a DPhil candidate at the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford. She was selected as the Charles Wallace India Trust Translator-Writer Fellow in 2017 for creative writing and translation, hosted by Literature Across Frontiers. An alumna of SOAS University of London, she has been a Research Fellow at Sarai, CSDS; and a translator-in-residence at the Sangam House international writers’ residency in Bangalore. She has written on languages, literature and translation for publications such as Huffington Post, The Caravan Magazine, TheWire.in, Scroll.in and the WorldKidLit Blog. Her English-Hindi translations have been published by Tulika Publishers.

LUNCH

14:00–15:00

Publishing Translation: A Panel Discussion

Tsuzuki Lecture Theatre, St Anne’s College

In this panel, we will hear from representatives of three innovative platforms for the independent publishing of translated fiction. Jen Calleja (Praspar Press), Emily Jones (Paper Republic), and Aina Marti (Héloïse Press) will share their stories and experiences, and discuss the current state of literary translation from multiple perspectives. This panel will be chaired by Merve Emre.

Jen Calleja is a writer and literary translator based in Hastings. Her books include I’m Afraid That’s All We’ve Got Time For (Prototype, 2020) and Goblins (Rough Trade Books, 2020), and she writes a column on translation for the Brixton Review of Books. She has translated German-language authors including Wim Wenders, Kerstin Hensel, Gregor Hens, Michelle Steinbeck and Raphaela Edelbauer, and has been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize and the Schlegel-Tieck Prize. She is a PhD candidate at UEA working on a creative-critical project exploring literary translators’ memoirs, and runs Praspar Press with Kat Storace.

Emily Jones is a Trustee of Paper Republic. She learnt Chinese at the universities of Cambridge, Ningbo, and Qingdao and was the recipient of a BCLT mentorship in translation in 2011. As a translator, she has worked on crime fiction, poetry, family sagas, and historical romps by authors from Hong Kong, mainland China and Taiwan. Emily helped set up Paper Republic as a charity, and has been involved in education projects, the Read Paper Republic series of short stories in translation, and, most recently, the creation of the Paper Republic Guide to Contemporary Chinese Literature.

Aina Marti completed her PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Kent in 2018. She lectured in French and Catalan, and worked shortly in TV production. She founded Héloïse Press in 2021, a indie house specialising in contemporary women's writing, bringing together women's experiences and literary sophistication across the globe. Héloïse Press' first release Thirsty Sea by Erica Mou and translated by Clarissa Botsford was released on May 17. Aina Marti´s book Domestic Architecture, Literature and the Sexual Imaginary in Europe (1850-1930) will be out this fall with Edinburgh University Press.

Merve Emre is associate professor of English at the University of Oxford. She earned a BA from Harvard and a PhD from Yale. She is the author of Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America (2017), The Ferrante Letters (2019), and The Personality Brokers (2018), and is a contributing writer at The New Yorker. In 2022, she is serving as one of the judges of the International Booker Prize. From 2022-23, she will be a Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the Shapiro Center at Wesleyan University.

TEA & COFFEE BREAK

15:30–16:45

[CANCELLED] Mona Baker in Conversation with Matthew Reynolds

Tsuzuki Lecture Theatre, St Anne’s College

In this event, the eminent translation scholar and activist Mona Baker, author of Translation and Conflict and editor of the award-winning Translating Dissent, will discuss her recent and ongoing work, including 'Translating the Egyptian Revolution', with Matthew Reynolds, with a particular focus on the topic of solidarity and issues relating to prefigurative translation in the Global South as opposed to the Global North. Unfortunately this event has had to be cancelled.

Mona Baker is Affiliate Professor at the Centre for Sustainable Health Education (SHE), University of Oslo, where she is responsible for developing the Oslo Medical Corpus, and co-coordinator of the Genealogies of Knowledge Research Network. She is Director of the Baker Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies at Shanghai International Studies University, and Honorary Dean of the Graduate School of Translation and Interpretation at Beijing Foreign Studies University. She is author of In Other Words: A Coursebook on Translation and Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account; editor of Translating Dissent: Voices from and with the Egyptian Revolution (winner of the 2016 Intranews Linguist of the Year Award); and co-editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies and the Routledge Encyclopedia of Citizen Media. Her articles have appeared in a wide range of international journals, including Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, Social Movement Studies, Critical Studies on Terrorism, Social Semiotics and The Translator. She posts on translation, citizen media and Palestine on her personal website and tweets at @MonaBaker11.

Translating Ice Age Signs: Jean-Luc Champerrret and The Lascaux Notebooks

Philip Terry in conversation with Adriana X. Jacobs

Seminar Room 7, St Anne's College

This presentation will introduce Jean-Luc Champerret’s experimental translation of Ice Age signs from the caves of Lascaux, where he reads the signs as proto-pictographic script, inserting them into the frequent 3 x 3 grids to be found in the Lascaux caves to recreate Ice Age poetry. The discussion will broaden to discuss this work as a form of speculative fiction.

Philip Terry was born in Belfast, and is a poet, translator, and a writer of fiction.  He has translated the work of Georges Perec, Michèle Métail and Raymond Queneau, and is the author of the novel tapestry, shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. His poetry and experimental translations include Oulipoems, Quennets, Dante’s Inferno, and Dictator, a version of the Epic of Gilgamesh in Globish. The Penguin Book of Oulipo, which he edited, was published in Penguin Modern Classics in 2020, and Carcanet published his edition of Jean-Luc Champerret’s The Lascaux Notebooks, the first ever anthology of Ice Age poetry, in April 2022.

Adriana X. Jacobs is an associate professor of modern Hebrew literature at the University of Oxford, where she specializes on contemporary Hebrew poetry and translation. Her translations of Hebrew poetry include Vaan Nguyen's The Truffle Eye, published in 2021 by Zephyr Press, and Merav Givoni Hrushovski's END—, forthcoming this year from Carrion Bloom Books.

17:00–18:15

“This is Why”: Translators on Translating

Seminar Room 7, St Anne's College

Join acclaimed literary translators who have featured on prestigious shortlists and longlists to hear more about their translation practices and choices. They will discuss a short poem or passage that they have recently translated, and give the audience insight into the “hows” and “whys” of their approach. This event will be chaired by Professor Karen Leeder.

Karen Leeder is a writer, translator and academic, and is Professor of Modern German Literature at New College, Oxford where she works especially on modern and contemporary German poetry and runs the project ‘Mediating Modern Poetry’. She is a prize-winning translator of a number of German-language authors: including Evelyn Schlag, Volker Braun, Michael Krüger and Raoul Schrott and has won the Stephen Spender Prize, the Schlegel-Tieck Prize, the John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize and a PEN-Heim Prize (USA) for her translations of German poetry. Her most recent translations include Ulrike Almut Sandig, I am a field full of rapeseed, give cover to deer and shine like thirteen oil-paintings laid one on top of the other (2020) longlisted for the ALTA translation prize and shortlisted for the Weidenfeld translation prize; and Durs Grünbein, Porcelain: Poem on the Downfall of my City (2020) winner of the Schlegel-Tieck Prize of the Society of Authors 2021. Her translation of Grünbein’s Oxford Weidenfeld Lectures, For the Dying Calves: Beyond Literature, appeared in 2021 and her translation of Ulrike Almut Sandig’s first novel, Monsters like us, is scheduled for June 2022 (both with Seagull Books).

18:30–20:00

Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize Short List Readings and Prize-Giving 

Tsuzuki Lecture Theatre, St Anne’s College

The Oxford–Weidenfeld Prize is for book-length literary translations into English from any living European language. It aims to honour the craft of translation, and to recognise its cultural importance. It was founded by Lord Weidenfeld and is supported by New College, The Queen’s College, and St Anne’s College, Oxford. This celebration of literary translation will feature readings from the work of the shortlisted translators, and the presentation of the prize.

DINNER

This year, owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, Oxford Translation Day took place as online events over a series of weeks leading up to 12 June 2021. Video recordings of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize award announcement and of the shortlisted translators were made available on 12 June 2021.

Monday 31st May

13:00–14:00

The Curse of Knowledge: The Translator as Perpetual Student

Online via Microsoft Teams

Anton Hur, the English translator of Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny, described “the curse of knowledge” in translation, or the various ways an otherwise learned and well-meaning translator can inadvertently sabotage their own work, a common occurrence in a profession where the practitioners tend to be highly educated and often marginalized. Drawing from his own experiences as a professional literary translator, Anton talked about the helpful and harmful effect of education in translators, the factors of translators’ positions in society that lead to certain artifacts in the product, “the perfect bilingual problem”, and how translators can break the curse and the various false binaries that bind their practice in order to grow not just as translators but as readers and human beings. Anton explored the double-sided nature of knowledge, discipline, and theory as relevant to his own process of bringing Cursed Bunny into English, combining (or queering) the two “genders” of translators—theorist and practitioner—to propose a learned but intuitive practice tailored to and by the specific translator.

Anton Hur was born in Stockholm, Sweden. He is the English translator of several Korean authors including Kyung-Sook Shin, Bora Chung, Sang Young Park, and Jeon Sam-hye, as well as the Korean translator of Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds. Anton was educated at the Korea University College of Law and Seoul National University Graduate School and has taught at the Ewha University Graduate School of Translation and Interpretation and Yonsei University. He divides his time between Seoul and Songdo, Korea.

This event is held in partnership with the Queen's Translation Exchange.

Friday 11th June

14:00–15:00

A Discussion and Reading of Max Lobe’s A Long Way from Douala

Online via Microsoft Teams

A Long Way from Douala is the first publication in English of a work by Max Lobé, a Cameroonian writer hailed as an important new voice in African writing. His poignant novel explores important issues, such as violence, terrorism, homosexuality, and migration.

At this online event, Ros Schwartz, the novel’s acclaimed translator, discussed and read a passage from the novel. This session also included a Q&A with the audience.

Ros Schwartz is a literary translator from French into English who lives in London. Among many other things, she has translated Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, sixteen of George Simenon’s Maigret novels and a range of contemporary French works of fiction and nonfiction, including Mireille Gansel’s Translation as Transhumance. She has translated a number of Francophone writers, namely Ousmane Sembène, Fatou Diome, Aziz Chouaki, Tahar Ben Jelloun and Yasmina Khadra. She is co-chair of English PEN’s Writers in Translation committee and gives regular talks and workshops. Her translations have won a number of awards, and in 2009 she was made a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

A Discussion and Poetry Reading of Vaan Nguyen’s The Truffle Eye

Online via Microsoft Teams

We joined Adriana X. Jacobs to discuss and read poems from her translation of Vaan Nguyen’s The Truffle Eye. Vaan Nguyen has been described as “a veritable juggler of Hebrew,” a poet whose work radically remixes world classics and pop culture, the personal and the political, past and present. Born in 1982 in Israel to refugees of the Vietnam War, Nguyen’s debut collection The Truffle Eye addresses questions of identity and cultural legacy from what she has described as “points of emotion and shock.” Her poems travel far and wide, between Tel Aviv and Hanoi, taking in views of Manhattan, Paris, Milan, Salzburg, Pasadena and more. Through these movements, Nguyen reflects on how our lives take shape in the daily migrations we make between lovers, family, work, and the places we call home.

Adriana X. Jacobs is an associate professor of modern Hebrew literature at the University of Oxford, where she specializes on contemporary Israeli poetry and translation. Her translations of Hebrew poetry have appeared in various print and online venues, including Zeek, Metamorphoses, Truck, Poetry International, Gulf Coast and MQR. 

Saturday 12th June

15:00–16:00

A Discussion and Poetry Reading of Abdilatif Abdalla’s Voice of Agony

Online via Microsoft Teams

Abdilatif Abdalla and Annmarie Drury read from Abdalla’s poetry collection Sauti ya Dhiki (Voice of Agony), one of the most important Swahili poetry collections of the twentieth century, and discuss its art and the story behind it. Imprisoned from 1969 to 1972 for his political activism, Abdalla wrote his poems on toilet paper. First smuggled out of prison, they were published after his release, in 1973, by Oxford University Press. Abdalla and Drury talked about the book’s first-ever English version, a forthcoming volume translated by the late novelist Ken Walibora Waliaula and edited by Drury, about the experience, challenges, and rewards of creating that volume, and about the link Sauti ya Dhiki has to the poetic tradition of Abdilatif’s birthplace, the coastal town of Mombasa.

Abdilatif Abdalla is a Kenyan poet, political activist, and literary translator best known for his poetry collection Sauti ya Dhiki (Voice of Agony, 1973), written while he was in prison. He has published literary translations into Swahili (including of Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born), worked for the BBC Swahili Service, and held teaching positions at the University of Dar es Salaam, SOAS University of London, and the University of Leipzig.

Annmarie Drury is a scholar and poet who translates from Swahili to English. She is the editor and translator of Stray Truths: Selected Poems of Euphrase Kezilahabi (Michigan State UP 2015) and the author of Translation as Transformation in Victorian Poetry (Cambridge UP 2015), as well as of many poems published in Raritan, The Paris Review, and other journals. She is an associate professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York.

17:00

Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize Short List Readings and Prize-Giving 

Video recordings of shortlisted translators for the 2021 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize reading from their work and a video recording of the announcement of the winner of the 2021 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize were made available on our YouTube channel.

This year, owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, Oxford Translation Day took place as online sessions over a series of weeks leading up to 13 June 2020. Video recordings of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize award announcement and of the shortlisted translators, as well as of some of Oxford Translation Day's online events, were made available on 13 June 2020.

Monday 18th May

13:00–14:00

Parwana Fayyaz on the Poets of Herat

Online via Microsoft Teams

In this event we enjoyed a reading and conversation with the poet Parwana Fayyaz, who won Best Single Poem at the Forward Prizes 2019 for her poem ‘Forty Names’, which draws inspiration both narrative and lyrical from medieval Persian traditions. Born in Kabul, Afghanistan, Fayyaz is currently finishing her PhD on the medieval Persian poet Jami at Trinity College, Cambridge. She read her translations of two very different poets from Herat, Jami and Nadia Anjuman (1980-2005), alongside her own poems. This session was introduced by MPT editor Clare Pollard.

This event was proudly co-hosted in partnership with Modern Poetry in Translation and the Queen’s Translation Exchange.

Monday 25th May

17:00–18:00

Ghost Letters: A Poetry Reading with Baba Badji

Online via Microsoft Teams

From his own deceased mother, Baba Badji’s Ghost Letters creates a ghost mother who becomes a presiding presence in his first collection of poems. Ghost Letters explores the intimacy of a private experience, focused on the momentary. At the same time, it focuses on a personal awareness of belonging, and in ruptured storylines investigates networks of people in different registers across mortalities, experiences of violence and hospitality, exile, history, and African myth. 

Baba Badji is a Senegalese American poet, translator, a researcher and a PhD in Comparative Literature, with the Track for International Writers & a combined Graduate Certificate in Translation Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. His research and teaching interests centre on the links between the various forms of postcolonial studies literature and theory, with a particular focus on the debates for cultural, translation, literary and Négritude in Anglophone and Francophone cultures.

Saturday 13th June

15:00

Sophie Hughes Discusses the Novel Hurricane Season

In these recordings, Sophie Hughes talks about her translation of Fernanda Melchor's 2020 International Booker shortlisted novel Hurricane Season (Fitzcarraldo Editions). This online event begins with a reading, followed by a short talk on the challenges of translating the novel, described by the New York Times as “a narrative that not only decries an atrocity but embodies the beauty and vitality it perverts.” Sophie also reflects on how we translate vernaculars, slang, idiolects and violent language before answering questions on these or other aspects of literary translation. 

Sophie Hughes is a literary translator from Spanish, known for her translations of writers such as Alia Trabucco Zerán, Laia Jufresa, Rodrigo Hasbún and José Revueltas. She has been shortlisted twice for the International Booker Prize, most recently in 2020 for Fernanda Melchor's Hurricane Season (Fitzcarraldo Editions). Sophie is currently working with the Stephen Spender Trust promoting translation as a tool for foreign language and literacy learning in schools. She is the co-editor of the anthology Europa28: Writing by Women on the Future of Europe in association with Wom@rts, Hay Festival and Comma Press. 

Watch the video recordings of this event via the links: Sophie Hughes reads from Hurricane Season, Sophie Hughes discusses Hurricane Season, and Q&A with Sophie Hughes. These recordings are proudly co-hosted in partnership with the Queen’s Translation Exchange.

A.E. Stallings Discusses Two Female Modern Greek Poets

Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke and Kiki Dimoula (born in 1939 and 1931 respectively) both left this life in early 2020, leaving behind a huge absence in Modern Greek letters. Both women came of literary age in a post-war Greece whose liberty would be shadowed by the military dictatorship of the Junta. Yet it would be hard to think of two Greek poets further apart in their sensibilities: one famously translatable (a translator in her own right, and widely translated by Anglophone poets), translation itself being a prime subject; and the other famously impossible to translate, where the idiosyncrasies of Greek grammar operate as one of her central metaphors. It is hard to think of two contemporary Greek poets with such different voices, but for both the matrix of poetry was the Greek language itself. Stallings looks at and discusses poems by both poets, and various approaches in translation to bringing their work across into English.

A.E. Stallings is an American poet who studied Classics at the University of Georgia and Oxford.  She has published three collections of poetry, Archaic Smile, Hapax, and Olives, and a verse translation (in rhyming fourteeners!) of Lucretius, The Nature of Things. She has received a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and fellowships from United States Artists, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation.  She is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  She speaks and lectures widely on a variety of topics, and has been a regular faculty member at the West Chester Poetry Conference and the Sewanee Summer Writers' Conference.

Watch the video recording of this event here.

Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize Short List Readings and Prize-Giving 

Video recordings of shortlisted translators for the 2020 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize reading from their work and a video recording of the announcement of the winner of the 2020 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize were made available on our YouTube channel.

Friday 14th June

17:15–19:00

Prismatic Jane Eyre

Seminar Room 11, St Anne's College

Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre is not only an English book: it exists in over fifty languages, in over five-hundred translations. How can we make sense of this multilingual cloud of writing? What can we do with it? Matthew Reynolds, Eleni Philippou, Kasia Szymanska, and Yousif Qasmiyeh explored the possibilities. Audiences got to follow many linguistic pathways and encounter several different Janes, all strangely different yet somehow the same. 

The speakers are all attached to Creative Multilingualism’s Prismatic Translation project based at the University of Oxford.

Saturday 15th June

11:30–13:00

Crossing Borders, Reaching Home: A Multilingual Translation Workshop

Seminar Room 7, St Anne's College

In response to Brexit, worrying political nationalism, and the tightening of borders, this workshop celebrated the fluidity and movement of language and identities! We took poems drawn from the Wretched Strangers literary anthology (2018) and translated them into multiple different languages, before translating our translations back into English. Native-speaker graduate students and early-career academics assisted and offered guidance on the translations. We closed the workshop by comparing the source poems and their retranslations into English to see what had been both gained and lost in the process. 

Participants should have had at least GSCE level knowledge of any one of the following languages: French, Italian, Arabic, Polish, German, or Chinese. 

The workshop was run by Ania Ready (OUP) and Kasia Szymanska (Oxford) with the assistance of the following language facilitators: Mariana Bonnouvrier (French), Claudio Russello (Italian), Yousif Qasmiyeh (Arabic) and Aoife Cantrill (Chinese).

Creative Translation in the Classroom

Colin Matthew Room, Radcliffe Humanities Building

This workshop was for teachers of MFL at primary and secondary level, exploring the use of ‘creative translation’.

As well as being a stimulating way of expanding pupils’ vocabulary and developing their linguistic flexibility, creative translation develops pupils’ critical awareness of other languages and cultures; highlights the value of knowing other languages; raises the profile, confidence and self-esteem of multilingual children; develops broad-spectrum literacy and decoding skills; promotes collaborative learning; and provides a springboard for creative writing and story-telling. This hands-on workshop introduced participants to the principles of creative translation through a series of interactive exercises that can be used in the classroom from KS2 onwards. The workshop was run by the co-directors of the new ‘Translation Exchange’ at Queen’s College Oxford, Charlotte Ryland and Jennifer Higgins.

This event was proudly co-hosted in partnership with the Queen’s Translation Exchange.

14:00–15:15

Romancing the Romantics

Seminar Room 7, St Anne's College

When the English reader thinks of Romanticism, evocative and soulful poems by Lord Byron, Wordsworth, and Coleridge all spring to mind. However, Romanticism, with its glorification of nature, emotion, the individual, spanned Europe and produced truly magnificent literary works. This event hoped to introduce an English-speaking audience to Continental Romanticism, but also asked two key questions. Firstly, what does it mean to translate European Romantics for English-language readers of the twenty-first century? And secondly, what are the pleasures and challenges of bringing more central and lesser-known Romantic traditions into English? In this event, two translators discussed their recent renderings of Romantic works from German and Polish. Howard Gaskill presented his translation of Friedrich Hölderlin's only novel Hyperion, or the Hermit in Greece (Open Book Publishers 2019) and Bill Johnston discussed his Guggenheim-funded translation of Adam Mickiewicz's Pan Tadeusz, considered the last great epic poem in European literature (Archipelago 2018). The event was chaired by Nick Halmi.

Howard Gaskill is Honorary Fellow in German (Reader until 2001) at the University of Edinburgh. His work concentrates in German Romanticism (in particular Friedrich Hölderlin) and Scottish-German literary relations (in particular German Ossianism). He is a member of the editorial boards of Comparative Critical Studies and Translation & Literature.

Bill Johnston is Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University, Bloomington. He has received fellowships and awards for his translations from Found in Translation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN America Center, and Three Percent. He was awarded the PEN Translation Prize and Three Percent’s Best Translated Book Award in 2012.

Nick Halmi is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford and Margaret Candfield Fellow of University College, Oxford. He is the author of The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol (OUP, 2007) and the editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose (2013).

15:30–16:30

The Land Drenched in Tears: Translating the Uyghur Memoir

Book Launch and Conversation with Rahima Mahmut

Seminar Room 7, St Anne's College

The Land Drenched in Tears by Söyüngül Chanishef is the first Uyghur language book to be published in English. It is a poignant memoir that provides a rare glimpse into the tumultuous history of Xinjiang (East Turkestan) during the Mao era from the perspective of an ethnic Tartar woman. The memoir follows Chanishef from her student years to her nearly two decades of imprisonment for her political activism, offering us a previously untold story of China’s Cultural Revolution and casting stark relief on the current situation in Xinjiang today.

This timely conversation with the book’s translator, Rahima Mahmut, foregrounded the difficult reality in Xinjiang today, reflecting on the book’s translation and publication in English against the backdrop of state censorship and cultural erasure. We spoke to the politics of translating from a minoritized language into English, as well as the highly complex linguistic and cultural reality that informs Mahmut’s translation practice and her own journey as a translator (Mahmut had to learn to read Cyrillic script in order to read the book in the first place, as this Turkic language is written in different scripts inside and outside of China).

Rahima Mahmut is a London-based Uyghur singer, translator and human rights activist. Her translation of The Land Drenched in Tears received an English Pen grant.

[CANCELLED] Modern Poetry in Translation: André Naffis-Sahely on the Poetry of Exile

The Shulman Auditorium, Queen’s College

Join Modern Poetry in Translation for a reading and conversation with André Naffis-Sahely, whose translations include over twenty titles of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction from French and Italian. From Abu Dhabi, but born in Venice to an Iranian father and an Italian mother, André’s own book of poetry is entitled The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life (Penguin UK, 2017). André will be reading translations from his forthcoming landmark anthology The Heart of a Stranger: An Anthology of Exile Literature (Pushkin Press, 2019), as well as from some of the poets he has translated for Modern Poetry in Translation, who include Frankétienne, Abdellatif Laâbi and Michèle Lalonde. After his reading, André will discuss his itinerant life as a translator with MPT editor Clare Pollard.

17:00–18:30

“This is Why”: Translators on Translating

Seminar Room 9, St Anne's College

Audiences were invited to join acclaimed literary translators who have featured on prestigious shortlists and longlists to hear more about their translation practices and choices. They discussed a short poem or passage that they recently translated, and gave the audience insight into the “hows” and “whys” of their translatory approach! This year we were thrilled to be joined by Bryan Karetnyk, Celia Hawkesworth, Rosie Hedger, Rachael McGill, Nick Caistor, and Delija Valiukenas all shortlisted for the 2019 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize. This session was chaired by Karen Leeder.

Bryan Karetnyk is a Wolfson Scholar in the Humanities at University College London. He read Russian and Japanese at the University of Edinburgh. In recent years he has translated several major works by the émigré author Gaito Gazdanov, including The Spectre of Alexander Wolf (2013), The Buddha’s Return (2014) and The Flight (2016). He is also the editor and principal translator of the Penguin Classics anthology Russian Émigré Short Stories from Bunin to Yanovsky (2017). His writing has appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, the Los Angeles Review of Books and The Spectator.

Celia Hawkesworth is one of the pre-eminent translators of Croatian literature, with almost 40 titles to her name, including works by Dubravka Ugrešić and Nobel Prize winner Ivo Andrić. Hawkesworth taught Serbian and Croatian language and literature at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London, from 1971 to 2002, and since retiring has devoted herself full-time to translation. She has been the recipient of the Dereta Book of the Year Award and the Heldt Prize for the best translation by a woman in Slavic studies. She has also twice been shortlisted for the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize.

Rosie Hedger completed her MA (Hons) in Scandinavian Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Rosie spent a year at the University of Oslo taking courses in Norwegian literature and researching for her dissertation on contemporary Norwegian fiction. Rosie was selected as a candidate for the British Centre for Literary Translation’s mentoring scheme for emerging translators in 2012, mentored by Don Bartlett. Rosie’s most recent translations have included work by Helga Flatland and Gine Cornelia Pedersen. Rosie’s translation of Agnes Ravatn’s The Bird Tribunal won an English PEN Translates Award in 2016 and was selected for BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime. Her work has appeared in publications such as Words Without Borders, Asymptote and The Missing Slate.

Rachael McGill was born in the Shetland Islands. She lives with one foot in Britain, the other in Lisbon. She’s a playwright for stage and radio, prose writer and literary translator from French, German, Spanish and Portuguese. Her translation of The Desert and the Drum by Mbarek Ould Beyrouk is published by Dedalus. Her play The Lemon Princess is published by Oberon, as are her translations of the Kerstin Specht plays Marieluise (which won the Gate Theatre/Allied Domecq Translation Award) and The Time of the Tortoise. She has had short fiction published in anthologies, literary magazines and online. Her first novel, Fair Trade Heroin, was longlisted for the Linen Press First Chapter Award. It is coming out soon.

Nick Caistor is a British translator from Spanish, Portuguese and French. After living for several years in Latin America, on his return to Britain he began to work for the BBC World Service and to translate fiction by Latin American and Spanish authors. He has now translated some seventy works of fiction, and in 2006, 2008 and 2015 was awarded the Valle Inclán prize for translation from Spanish.

Delija Valiukenas graduated from New York City’s Hunter College and earned her Ph.D. in English Literature from Brown University, where her doctoral dissertation explored the linguistic and cultural dynamics of translation, as manifested in the Lithuanian translations of Shakespeare.  As a member of the faculty at Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts for 34 years, she taught upper-level courses in her area of specialization—Shakespeare—as well as introductory courses, primarily, in American literature. She was involved in the development of an interdisciplinary program in the Holocaust and taught the Literature of the Holocaust until she retired.  She has authored a Composition text (Random House) to address the problems of Freshman writing; written and translated articles for Baltic and Lithuanian journals; and was commissioned by the Lithuanian National Theatre of Kaunas to translate several Lithuanian plays into English. 

Karen Leeder is a writer, translator and academic, and teaches German at New College, Oxford where she works especially on modern poetry and runs the project Mediating Modern Poetry. She translates contemporary German literature into English, including works by Volker Braun, Michael Krüger Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Raoul Schrott. Her most recent translations include Evelyn Schlag’s All Under one Roof (Carcanet) which was the PBS summer translation selection (2018) and she was awarded an English PEN award and an American PEN/Heim award for her translations from Ulrike Almut Sandig’s Dickicht (Thick of it) which appeared with Seagull in 2018. Her translations of Durs Grünbein stretch back over a decade and were awarded the Stephen Spender Prize (2011) and the John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize (2018).

19:00–20:00

Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize Shortlist Readings and Prize-Giving

Seminar Room 9, St Anne's College

The Oxford–Weidenfeld Prize is for book-length literary translations into English from any living European language. It aims to honour the craft of translation, and to recognise its cultural importance. The prize was presented to the winner. This year’s judges were Charlotte Ryland, James Partridge, Emma Claussen, and Simon Park (Chair).

Friday 8th June

16:15–17:45

Ulrike Almut Sandig, Thick Of It (2018): Book Launch and Reading

Seminar Room 1, St Anne's College

The poems of Ulrike Almut Sandig are at once simple and fantastic. Her collection, Thick of It, explores an urgently urban reality, but that reality is interwoven with references to nightmares, the Bible, fairy tales, and nursery rhymes–all overlaid with a finely-tuned longing for a disappearing world. The old names are forgotten, identities fall away, things disappear from the kitchen: everything is sliding away. Thick of It offers language at its most crafted and transformative, blisteringly contemporary, but with a kind of austerity, too. By turns comic, ironic, sceptical, nostalgic, the poems are profoundly musical, exploiting multiple meanings, and stretching syntax. Ulrike Almut Sandig read from Thick of it (Seagull Books, 2018), and presented new poems and sound pieces with her translator Karen Leeder.

Ulrike Almut Sandig has published two books of short stories and four volumes of poetry in German. She often collaborates with filmmakers, composers, sound artists, and musicians. Her new album with her band LANDSCHAFT will appear in Autumn 2018. Karen Leeder is a writer, translator and academic, and teaches German at New College, Oxford. She was awarded an English PEN award and an American PEN/Heim award for her translations from Ulrike Almut Sandig’s Dickicht (Thick of it) in 2016.

18:00–20:00

The Tongue, That Untamed Flesh: Polish Poetry, Freedom, and Silence in Translation

Seminar Room, Radcliffe Humanities Building

Ryszard Krynicki, one of Poland’s most important contemporary poets and publishers, read from his work and talked with American poet and translator Alissa Valles about the struggle with censorship and propaganda and its complex effects on language both in Communist Poland and in society today more broadly. Valles’s English edition of Krynicki's collection Our Life Grows was published by the New York Review Books in 2017. This event introduced Anglophone audiences to the scope and acute ethical and aesthetic sensibility of a major figure in European literature. A Q&A and wine reception followed.

Saturday 9th June

10:30–11:45

Translating the Name: Arabic Workshop

Seminar Room 7, St Anne's College

How can proper nouns that belong to one language, to definite spaces marred and inscribed by memories and intimacies, be translated into another language? Through a close reading of poems and drafts produced mostly ‘on the spot’ in writing workshops attended by Syrian, Iraqi and Sudanese refugees (now based in Oxford), we examined some of the problematics of translation, especially apropos the translation of the intimate in poetry. The ‘legal’ marker, that is, ‘being refugees’, does not in any way diminish what we can conceptualise as ‘the poetic-before-refugeeness’, but, instead, it gives us the opportunity to follow (in) the footsteps of these young poets as they respond to their new presences through writing, at times in two tongues: Arabic and English. This workshop, led by Yousif M. Qasmiyeh and Matthew Reynolds, drew on an on-going collaborative endeavour between Oxford Spires Academy and Prismatic Translation, whose aim is to shed light on translation as an ongoing act of writing and rewriting.

Yousif M. Qasmiyeh is a poet and translator, and tutor in Arabic at the University of Oxford. He is Refugee Hosts’ Writer-in-Residence and also the Creative Encounters Editor for Migration and Society.

Matthew Reynolds is a literary academic, novelist, scholar of translations and author of (most recently) Translation: A Very Short Introduction.

How to Begin?: French Literary Translation Workshop

Seminar Room 9, St Anne's College

The opening lines of a novel or story present one of the literary translator’s most fun and complex challenges. In this workshop we translated the opening of a contemporary French short story, thinking about how to set the tone and establish a convincing voice. The session was run by Jenny Higgins, translator of several works of fiction and non-fiction. Participants should have had at least AS-level French.

Jenny Higgins translates from French and Italian. She has translated a range of novels, short stories and non-fiction. She has also translated Emmanuelle Pagano, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam and Rachilde.

12:00–13:15

How to Turn White Mice into Carriage Horses: The Magic Recipe for Becoming a Literary Translator

Tsuzuki Lecture Theatre, St Anne's College

So how do you get started as a translator of novels, children’s books, poetry, travel writing, and other literary works? What’s the magic spell that leads to your first publication? Translators from Polish Antonia Lloyd-Jones (whose first translation was published in 1990) and Eliza Marciniak (whose first translation was published in 2016) offered some insight into ways to get that crucial first commission, practicalities to consider, and pitfalls to avoid. They explained how to identify potential books to translate, how to prepare convincing materials for potential publishers, where to gain more information and contacts, and what special resources are available to help emerging translators, including the mentorship programme that brought them together as mentor and ‘mentee’. 

Antonia Lloyd-Jones has translated works by many of Poland’s leading contemporary novelists and authors of reportage, as well as crime fiction, poetry, screenplays, essays and children’s books. She is a mentor for the WCN Emerging Translator Mentorship Programme, and from 2015–17 was co-chair of the Translators Association. Eliza Marciniak’s first book-length translation, Swallowing Mercury by Wioletta Greg, was longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize. Her other translations include the three-volume Detective Nosegoode children's series by Marian Orłoń.

14:00–15:00

‘Write As You Will’: Translation Slam

Seminar Room 7, St Anne's College

Nicanor Parra's poem ‘Young Poets’ famously begins,

Write as you will
In whatever style you like
Too much blood has run under the bridge
To go on believing
That only one road is right.

In that revolutionary spirit, and in celebration Parra’s long life and work, we asked participants to ready themselves for a Spanish-to-English translation slam! Literary translators Rosalind Harvey and Ellen Jones were given Narra’s poem ‘Spots on the Wall’ to work on in advance of the slam. At the event, the original text and Rosalind and Ellen’s translations were supplied to the audience. Adriana X. Jacobs chaired a conversation about their translation choices, and audience members were invited to share their own translation suggestions. The idea of the slam was to pit–playfully!–two translations against each other and see what happens.

Adriana X. Jacobs is an academic and translator from modern Hebrew. Her monograph Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry is forthcoming from University of Michigan Press. Ellen Jones was the recipient of a Writers’ Centre Norwich Emerging Translator Mentorship and an ALTA Travel Fellowship. She has been Asymptote’s Criticism Editor since 2014. Rosalind Harvey is an acclaimed literary translator of contemporary Hispanic writing currently teaching at Warwick University.

15:15–16:30

Saffron Shadows and Salvaged Scripts

Seminar Room 9, St Anne's College

Ellen Wiles, a British novelist, human rights lawyer, and scholar specialising in literary culture and cultural ethnography discussed her book, Saffron Shadows and Salvaged Scripts: Literary Life in Myanmar Under Censorship and in Transition (Columbia University Press, 2015). Her book reflects on the experiences and recent output of nine Myanmar writers spanning three generations, featuring interviews and English-language translations of their work. The audience enjoyed lively readings from the book, preceded by a discussion with the postcolonial scholar Peter McDonald. A short Q&A followed.

Modern Poetry in Translation: Jane Draycott on Henri Michaux

The Shulman Auditorium, Queen’s College

Individuals joined Modern Poetry in Translation for a reading and conversation with Jane Draycott, focusing on her translation of Storms Under the Skin by Henri Michaux, a PBS Recommended Translation. Henri Michaux (1899-1984) was one of the most original and influential figures of twentieth century French poetry, hailed by Allen Ginsberg as ‘master’ and ‘genius’ and by Borges as ‘without equal in the literature of our time’. Jane Draycott has translated poems and prose-poems from Michaux’s volumes 1927-54, including extracts from his best-loved creations Plume and the haunting realm of Les Emanglons, alongside poems written on the eve of war in Europe and during the Occupation. After her reading, Jane discussed her translations with MPT editor Clare Pollard.

17:00–18:15

‘Her name on a book now is gold’: A Day in the Life of Ann Goldstein

Tsuzuki Lecture Theatre, St Anne's College

Ann Goldstein is an American editor and translator from Italian, perhaps best known for her translations of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels. Editors and writers the world over have said of Goldstein that ‘Her name on a book now is gold’. But what does it really mean to translate, to render from one language to another? Primo Levi, in a note to his translation of Kafka’s The Trial, said that as a translator he had ‘made a determined effort to balance faithfulness to the text with the flow of expression.’ In this talk Ann Goldstein discussed some of the problems a translator faces trying to follow Levi’s dictum, using examples from the various writers whose works she has translated, including Levi, Ferrante, Anna Maria Ortese, and others. Goldstein addressed as well how she came to be a translator from Italian and her process of translation.

Eleni Philippou introduced this event and Vilma de Gasperin of Oxford’s moderated this event. This event was kindly supported by the Italian Sub-Faculty.

19:00–20:00

Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize Short List Readings and Prize-Giving

Tsuzuki Lecture Theatre, St Anne’s College

The Oxford–Weidenfeld Prize is for book-length literary translations into English from any living European language. It aims to honour the craft of translation, and to recognise its cultural importance. The prize was presented to the winner. This year’s judges were Kasia Szymanska, Simon Park, Jessica Stacey, and Adriana X. Jacobs (Chair).

Oxford Translation Day was funded by a generous donation from Celia Atkin.

Saturday 3rd June

11:00–12:30

Masterclass in Chinese to English Literary Translation

Seminar Room 7, St Anne's College

Owing to the incredible success of Nicky Harman’s masterclass on Chinese to English literary translation in Michaelmas 2016, OCCT decided to REPEAT this event. Focusing on a single paragraph from Jia Pingwa’s 2007 novel Happy (《高兴》), we looked at the process of a working translator, with an eye to issues particular to Chinese-English translation. Through examining both the translator's drafts and and her final version, we discussed the practical problems of translation, starting with sentence structure, terminology and (nick)names. Nicky then unpicked the cultural references, both implicit and explicit, and finally considered the author’s intentions for this paragraph. The conversation then opened up for discussion, as the translator posed the question of whether her translation succeeded in recreating the same effect in English.

All were welcome. No knowledge of Chinese was necessary. A few short preparatory readings were circulated in advance to facilitate audience participation.

French Translation Workshop: Translating Conversations with Jenny Higgins

Seminar Room 9, St Anne's College

In this practical workshop explored ways of translating dialogue. This can be one of the most difficult things a translator ever has to do, but also one of the most interesting and creative. Using examples from fiction and film, participants worked together to produce and compare translations. Run by Jenny Higgins, translator of several works of fiction and non-fiction, this was a fun, challenging workshop aimed at opening up fresh ways of thinking about translation. Participants should have had at least AS-level French.

German Translation Workshop: “Proverbs – Sprichwörter”

Seminar Room, Radcliffe Humanities Building

While the English phrase 'to be like a bull in a china shop' is nearly the same in German, the animal is different (an elephant in this case). Some proverbs actually exist in both English and German - but the devil is in the detail. In this workshop, we explored the literal meanings as well as the metaphorical semantics of selected German proverbs. Proverbs are extremely difficult to translate while at the same time they can be seen as a gateway to a culture and its history. As 'frozen phrases' they preserve a meaning that may have been forgotten even by contemporary native speakers. This session offered activities to translate word by word as well as guessing contexts, introduced the semantic history of some phrases and linked it to English proverbs, that have a similar meaning (or have they?). Clare Ferguson, translator and previously Head of German at Magdalen College School, led this workshop.

Some knowledge of German was preferable: participants were welcome with anything from a few informal phrases to advanced knowledge of the language.

12:45–13:45

Translation: Practice vs Theory

Seminar Room 9, St Anne's College

Translation and translation theory have a complicated relationship. Theorists sometimes criticize translators; translators sometimes wish that theorists would shut up and get on with actual translations. And yet the work of translation can be enlivened by theoretical proposals, while theory has much to learn from close attention to translators' varying practices. People were invited to join the writers, translators and theorists Matthew Reynolds, Karen Leeder and Adriana X. Jacobs to explore this explosive terrain (and maybe witness a few skirmishes).

Matthew Reynolds is a literary academic, novelist and scholar of translations, author of (most recently) Translation: A Very Short Introduction.

Karen Leeder is an academic who writes among other things about literature and translation, and a prize-winning translator of modern German literature (especially poetry) into English.

Adriana X. Jacobs is an academic and translator from the Hebrew. Her monograph Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry is forthcoming from University of Michigan Press.

14:00–15:15

From Press to Public: Publishing Translated Literature

Seminar Room 7, St Anne's College

We invited representatives from three publishers (MacLehose; And Other Stories; Granta/Portobello) to explore the dynamics of publishing translated literature. Arranged in a “conversazione” format, these publishers informally discussed the marketing, economics, problems, and delights of publishing a genre that comprises a tiny percentage of the UK book market. The publishers was joined by Dr Rajendra Chitnis, an academic who recently completed a report on translating the literatures of small European nations. His project involved extensive engagement with translators, publishers, agents, booksellers, and national and third-sector bodies. The conversation was chaired by Dr Eleni Philippou.

15:30–16:45

The Bold and the Baltic: Women’s Writing from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania

Seminar Room 7, St Anne's College

At the moment the publishing industry’s attention is focused on the Baltic region as Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia have been selected as the market focus for the International London Book Fair in 2018. Although Baltic countries share a great deal of history, there are still significant enough differences among them to make their individual literary scenes unique and distinctive. This event brought together Baltic authors, translators, and literary critics to explore and showcase the female literary voices that have emerged from each of these countries since the breakdown of the Soviet Union. They asked: What are the idiosyncrasies and prevailing themes of women’s literary expression in each country? What do these female voices share? What does it mean to translate femininity? This event took the form of a conversation interspersed with short readings of contemporary Baltic women’s poetry and prose.

This event was kindly funded by the Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian embassies and cultural institutes.

17:00–18:00

‘I am a double-voiced bird’: Poetry in Dialogue

Seminar Room 7, St Anne's College

Ulrike Almut Sandig started publishing her poetry by pasting poems onto lamp posts in Leipzig and spreading them on flyers and free post cards as part of the ‘augenpost ohrenpost’ (eyemail  earmail) project. She is an electrifying performer who works with film, sound installation, music and spoken word to bring poetry to new audiences and is as likely to be found performing with rock groups as in conventional poetry venues. This session introduced her new libretto for the 1927 film Berlin: A Metropolis as well as some of short film and sound poems and opened into a discussion about how poetry can be in dialogue with other languages and other art forms. No knowledge of German was required to attend this event.

Ulrike Almut Sandig (b. 1979) has written two volumes of prose as well as sound works, CDs and four volumes of poetry, most recently ich bin ein Feld voller Raps verstecke die Rehe und leuchte wie dreizehn Ölgemälde übereinandergelegt (2016).

Karen Leeder is an academic and translator from the German. She won an English PEN award and a PEN America PEN/Heim award for her translations of Sandig in 2016.

[CANCELLED] A Conversation with Bernard O'Donoghue

Magrath Room, Queen's College

Bernard O'Donoghue had been scheduled to discuss and read from his new translation of Piers Plowman with Sasha Dugdale, editor of MPT, and Charlie Louth, Fellow in German, Queen's College.

19:00–20:00

Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize Short List Readings and Prize-Giving

Tsuzuki Lecture Theatre, St Anne’s College

The Oxford–Weidenfeld Prize is for book-length literary translations into English from any living European language. It aims to honour the craft of translation, and to recognise its cultural importance. It is founded by Lord Weidenfeld and funded by New College, The Queen’s College and St Anne’s College, Oxford. Those prize was presented to the winner.

Saturday 13th June

10:30–12:00

Classics and Swearing: A Talk and Discussion with James Methven, Nicola Gardini, Caterina Paoli, Ellie Keel and Valentina Gosetti

Seminar Room 3, St Anne's College

Join James Methven, Nicola Gardini, Caterina Paoli and Ellie Keel in a series of talks about classics and swearing. Nicola Gardini will show that Catullus's swearing ultimately advocates social justice and piety. Caterina Paoli and Ellie Keel will perform passages from Paolo Volponi’s Italian translation of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, and show how sexual puns and swearing are a way of accusing Athenian men of political ineptitude.‬ James Methven’s aim has been to muddy the waters surrounding theoretical problems of a translator’s biographical involvement in the work of a previous poet, and catch on the hop any reader so blithely unaware as to imagine that the ‘James’ / ‘Jim’ / ‘Jimmy’ who appears in the poems is him, James Methven. His poetic persona swears. A lot. He does not.

11:00–13:00

Oxford Student PEN: Poetry Translation Workshop with Yousif Qasmiyeh

Seminar Room, TORCH Humanities Centre

A workshop for those interested in poetry, translation and activism. Collaborating with leading Oxford-based poet Yousif Qasmiyeh, we will work together to translate a selection of Egyptian poetry by Huda Hussain, Rana Al-Tunusi, Aliyya Abdel-Salam, Fatima Qindil and Yaser Al-Zayyaat. No prior knowledge of Arabic is needed (we will provide lots of language help): you just need to be enthusiastic about poetry and language!

13:30–15:00

Translating Chinese and Japanese Texts: Two Talks

Seminar Room 3, St Anne's College

Dr Guo Ting (University of Edinburgh) will talk about the translation between Chinese and English of the terms 'religion' and the 'Dao'. Laurence Mann (Oriental Institute) will talk about the problems that are posed by translating Japanese particles into English.

Volatile Translations: A Conversation with Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Göransson

Seminar Room 9, St Anne's College

Publishers McSweeney and Göransson will discuss their work editing and publishing cross-boundary, multi-media, extremist works of translation and the possibility of translational literary cultures in the current global publishing economy. Action Books is an international poetry press that publishes original and translated works. Recently published translations include The Country of Planks / El País de Tablas by Raúl Zurita (translated by Daniel Borzutzky), Wild Grass on the Riverbank by Hiromi Itō (translated by Jeffrey Angles), and Dark Museum by María Negroni (translated by Michelle Gil-Monteiro).

14:00–16:00

Oxford German Network: Poetry Translation Workshop

Seminar Room, TORCH Humanities Centre

Participants will work together in pairs and in groups on translating a selection of modern German poetry. Using examples from these poems, participants will be introduced to some of the key issues around literary translation and especially translation of poetry. Participants will experiment with translating into different styles, genres and registers, and there will be book prizes for the most inventive and impressive contributions. This challenging, informative and fun workshop will be led by Prof. Karen Leeder, the prize-winning translator of contemporary poets such as Evelyn Schlag, Michael Krüger, Durs Grünbein and Volker Braun! Participants should have at least AS level German and be aged 17 or over. Places are limited and so booking is essential.

This event is supported by Routes into Language and HEFCE, who work to widen young participation in languages.

15:30–17:00

How To Be A Literary Translator: A Talk and Interactive Workshop by the Emerging Translators Network

Seminar Room 5, St Anne's College

An introduction to the ins and outs of literary translation hosted by Rosalind Harvey: practical advice on getting started, how and where to network, how to make a living and how to organise your freelance life. Whether you’ve just completed a degree or have worked for years as a professional word-wrangler and just need that extra push to start grappling with novels, plays or poetry in a more serious way, this is the place to come for all the tools and tips you need to make headway in the challenging and rewarding world of literary translation.

Translating Andrey Platonov: A Talk by Robert Chandler

Seminar Room 7, St Anne's College

Best known for his translations of Vasily Grossman and for his three anthologies for Penguin Classics - of Russian short stories, Russian magic tales and most recently The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry - Robert Chandler is also the co-translator of several volumes of stories and short novels by Andrey Platonov, whom he believes to be the greatest of all 20th century Russian prose writers. In a discussion led by Oliver Ready, he will talk about how his collaboration with the Russian-American scholar Olga Meerson led to some important new understandings of Platonov’s stories that neither he nor Olga would ever have arrived at on their own.

Modern Poetry in Translation: A Reading and Discussion

The Shulman Auditorium, The Queen’s College

Join Modern Poetry in Translation for a discussion and reading by Iranian poet Ziba Karbassi and her translator, poet Stephen Watts. Ziba Karbassi fled Iran in her teens and has made a home in London. She gained attention with her astonishing poem ‘Sangsar’, ‘Death By Stoning’, written in her early twenties, and concerning the stoning to death of a relative of her mother. Stephen Watts writes of her poetry, “I know of very few poets worldwide whose lyric intensity matches hers or whose language is as honest to terror and to love”. Stephen’s most recent work of poetry is Ancient Sunlight of which Robert Macfarlane wrote, “He is among the most fine and subtle writers I know on the relations of landscape and mind”. He has translated widely from many languages, always working in collaboration with the poet. This event is hosted by MPT editor, Sasha Dugdale.

17:30–19:00

Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize Short List Readings and Prize-Giving

Tsuzuki Lecture Theatre, St Anne's College

The Oxford–Weidenfeld Prize is for book-length literary translations into English from any living European language. It aims to honour the craft of translation, and to recognise its cultural importance. The celebration will feature readings from the work of the shortlisted translators, and the prize will be presented to the winner by Penelope Lively.

On June 13th and 14th, 2014, St Anne’s College hosted the first annual Oxford Translation Day, a celebration of literary translation consisting of workshops and talks throughout both days at St Anne’s and around the city, culminating in the award of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Our programme included a range of events which are all open to the public, providing students, translators, publishers, writers, and anyone interested in languages with the opportunity to discover and discuss literary translation.

Oxford Translation Day is a joint venture of Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation (OCCT) Research Centre and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, in partnership with Oxford Student PEN, the Poetry Translation Centre, the Oxford German Network and East Oxford Community Classics Centre.

Friday 13th June

15:00–17:00

Oxford Student PEN: Poetry Translation Workshop with Bernard O’Donoghue and Yousif M. Qasmiyeh

Room 3, Taylorian Institute

A workshop for those interested in poetry, translation and activism. A unique opportunity to collaborate with leading poets Bernard O’Donoghue and Yousif M. Qasmiyeh and to translate the poetry of Enoh Meyomesse, an imprisoned Francophone Cameroonian poet on whose behalf PEN is campaigning. If you would like to read more about his case and this campaign, see here. Crib-sheets will be provided: no prior knowledge of French necessary.

17:30–18:30

‘More Durable Than Brass?’ A Presentation by Jonathan Katz and Celia Campbell

East Oxford Community Classics Centre, Cheney School, OX3 7QH

Celia Campbell and Jonathan Katz, both classicists at St Anne’s College, will discuss English versions of Odes by the great Latin poet Horace (1st century BC), considering some of the problems that face translators and some of the solutions found. The talk will be accessible for Latinists and non-Latinists alike, and all will be welcome.

19:30–21:00

My Voice: A Decade of Poems from the Poetry Translation Centre: A Reading by Sarah Maguire and Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi

Albion Beatnik Bookshop, 34 Walton Street, OX2 6AA

The Poetry Translation Centre celebrates its 10th anniversary this month with the publication of My Voice: A Decade of Poems from the Poetry Translation Centre, a dazzling array of 111 poems translated from 23 different languages—from Arabic to Zapotec—by 45 of the world’s leading poets, edited by PTC Director, the acclaimed poet Sarah Maguire. For this special event, Sarah will read translations from the anthology accompanied by Sudanese poet Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi reading his own outstanding poems in Arabic.

Saturday 14th June

11:00–13:00

Translating Outside of the Box: A Workshop with Rosalind Harvey and Adriana X. Jacobs

Seminar Room 3, St Anne's College

Working with pre-circulated texts, participants will make use of various props and prompts that will encourage them to push their translation practice beyond textual fidelity and to craft translations that manipulate and play with the target language. This workshop will activate the unexpected, creative and transformative places to which translation often brings the translator. Knowledge of Spanish preferred but not required.

11:30–13:00

Oxford German Network: Translation Slam!

Seminar Room, TORCH Humanities Centre

Oxford German Network in conjunction with Oxford Translation Day invites you to participate in a translation workshop hosted by OGN and Charlotte Ryland, Editor of New Books in German. Participants will be introduced to some of the fundamental issues surrounding translation and take part in a collaborative translation slam. Dictionaries and texts will be provided—but please bring your own pen and paper! Some knowledge of German required.

14:00–15:00

A Discussion on World Literature: Marina Warner, Flora Drew and Rebecca Carter

The Old Fire Station, 40 George Street, OX1 2AQ

Marina Warner (writer, mythographer and Chair of Judges for the Man Booker International Prize), Rebecca Carter (publisher and literary agent) and translator Flora Drew in discussion about world literature and translation.

15:30–17:00

English PEN Workshop: Freedom to Read, Freedom to Write

Seminar Room 7, St Anne's College

A creative writing session with a difference. English PEN works with imprisoned writers across the world. This workshop uses poetry from international writers at risk as a ‘jumping-off point’ for creative writing – and a celebration of ways that writers courageously and imaginatively strive to liberate their ideas and writing.

Languages, Places, Fiction and Memory: A Reading and Discussion with Patrick McGuinness and Matthew Reynolds

Seminar Room 8, St Anne's College

Patrick McGuinness will read from Other People’s Countries (‘the great book on Belgium and modern memory’ – Guardian), Matthew Reynolds will read from The World Was All Before Them (‘a fascinating, strange and formally delightful novel’ – Independent), and they will join in discussion with one another and the audience about languages, places, fiction and memory.

17:30–19:00

Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize Short List Readings and Prize-Giving

Tsuzuki Lecture Theatre, St Anne's College

The Oxford–Weidenfeld Prize is for book-length literary translations into English from any living European language. It aims to honour the craft of translation, and to recognise its cultural importance. It is funded by Lord Weidenfeld and by New College, The Queen’s College and St Anne’s College, Oxford. Those translators short-listed for the prize will discuss their work, and the prize will be presented to the winner.