Literary translation and creativity

Thursday 12th May 2022 13:00-14:30 | Online (zoom)

Carolina Orloff, Cecilia Rossi and Polly Barton

Moderated by Karítas Hrundar Pálsdóttir

The role of a literary translator is often under-appreciated, but with the International Man Booker Prize and rise in translated works published in the UK, translators are finally being recognised for their creativity. Latin American works-in-translation publisher Carolina Orloff, translator Polly Barton and UEA's Dr Cecilia Rossi discuss the current boom in translated works and how this is shaping the UK publishing industry. Could this be a professional avenue for researchers able to speak two or more languages?

Carolina Orloff is an author, translator and scholar who has been working on research projects studying the literature, politics and culture of contemporary Argentina. At the end of 2016, together with Sam McDowell, Carolina co-founded Charco Press, an independent publishing house focused on the translation into English of contemporary Latin American literature. In addition to writing and publishing on Argentinian and Latin American literature, cinema, politics and education, Carolina has also published articles on translation theory. Her main focus of research, however, has always been the writer Julio Cortázar, around whom she has published extensively, including a monograph which appeared in the UK (Tamesis, 2013) and which she herself translated into Spanish and which appeared in 2015 as La construcción de lo político en Julio Cortázar by Ediciones Godot. Her Spanish translation of Virginia Woolf's short stories was published in Argentina, also by Ediciones Godot (2015).

Cecilia Rossi is an Associate Professor in Literature and Translation at UEA. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from Cardiff University and a PhD in Literary Translation from UEA. Her original poetry has appeared in various journals such as New Welsh Review and Poetry Wales, as well as anthologised in The Pterodactyl’s Wing (Parthian, 2003). Her translations of Alejandra Pizarnik’s poetry into English have won various awards, including First Prize in the John Dryden Translation Competition and a commendation in the Stephen Spender Prize for Poetry Translation, and have appeared in Comparative Criticism (CUP, 2000), Modern Poetry in Translation (2005, 2010), and Alejandra (a volume of essays on Pizarnik published by Syracuse University Press, 2010). Her research into the process of translating Alejandra Pizarnik’s poetry has been published in Árbol de Alejandra: Pizarnik Reassessed, edited by Fiona Mackintosh with Karl Posso (Tamesis, 2007). She has also published the following volumes of translated poetry with Waterloo Press: Selected Poems by Alejandra Pizarnik (2010), Solos y solas / Men and Women Alone by Tamara Kamenszain (2010) and Ronda de noche / Night Watch by Ana Becciú (2010) and Tamara Kamenszain’s El eco de mi madre / The Echo of my Mother (2012). Her translations of excerpts of the Diarios de Alejandra Pizarnik and a selection of Pizarnik's prose texts appeared in Music and Literature No. 6 (2015). In 2019 Ugly Duckling Presse published her translations of Alejandra Pizarnik's The Last Innocence and The Lost Adventures.

Polly Barton is a Japanese to English translator currently living in Bristol, UK. Born and raised in West London, she studied Philosophy at Cambridge University before moving to Japan to teach English on a remote island. There she began to learn Japanese, and quickly became hooked. After earning her MA in the Theory and Practice of Translation from SOAS (University of London), she slowly made her way back to Japan, via Frankfurt where she worked for a stint at Nintendo of Europe. In 2012, Polly was awarded first prize in the inaugural Japanese Language Publishing Project (JLPP) Competition for her translations of Kobo Abe and Natsuki Ikezawa. She has been working as a freelance translator for ten years now, specialising in literature, non-fiction books, art-related and academic texts. She is a recipient of a 2017 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, the 2016 Kyoko Selden Memorial Translation Prize, and the 2012 Japanese Literature Publishing Project's Inaugural Translation Contest. Fifty Sounds, Polly's debut that one the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions essay Prize, is a personal dictionary of the Japanese language, recounting her life as an outsider in Japan.

Karítas Hrundar Pálsdóttir is a Creative-Critical PhD student at the University of East Anglia. Her research explores the phenomenon of reentry, that is sojourners’ experience of returning home after a period of living abroad. Karítas is the author of the book Árstíðir – sögur á einföldu máli (Seasons – Stories in Easy Language), a flash-fiction collection composed of 101 stories intended for adult learners of Icelandic as a second language, which was published by Una útgáfuhús in January 2020.

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TCW | Literary translation and creativity