F188. Translating from the Peripheries, Sponsored by ALTA

Room 12, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
Friday, March 9, 2018
12:00 pm to 1:15 pm

 

Translating from the peripheries of a dominant language, e.g. from Taiwan/Hong Kong for Chinese, from Austria/Switzerland for German, or from Venezuela/Chile for Spanish, underscores questions about what readers and publishers expect in translated literature. Panelists discuss the challenges and rewards of translating authors on the margins of their own language, such as an Austrian writer whose books were initially mis-received by German reviewers for being written in "Austrian.”


Participants

Moderator:

Chenxin Jiang translates from the Italian, German, and Chinese. She is senior editor (Chinese) at Asymptote Journal. Recent translations include Volatile Texts by Zsuzsanna Gahse and The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution by Ji Xianlin, awarded a 2011 PEN Translation Grant.

Annie Janusch is the translator of four novels by Wolf Haas, the Heinrich von Kleist novella The Duel, as well as works by Jürgen Goldstein, Anja Kampmann, Walter Kappacher, and Uwe Tellkamp. She is fiction editor of the Chicago Review and a fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Kelsi Vanada is a poet and translator in Iowa. She holds an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and an MFA in literary translation from the University of Iowa. Her translation of Spanish poet Berta García Faet's La edad de merecer came out last year. She was a 2016 ALTA Travel Fellow.

Rachael Small

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February 7–10, 2024
Kansas City, Missouri

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