Interview | Sophie Lewis | Translator of the Week

Sophie Lewis is a London-born writer, editor and translator from French (since 2005) and Portuguese (since 2012). She has translated works by Stendhal, Verne, Marcel Aymé, Violette Leduc, Emmanuelle Pagano, Noémi Lefebvre, João Gilberto Noll and Sheyla Smanioto, among others. She was Senior Editor at indie trade publisher And Other Stories from 2010 to 2016. In 2016 she co-founded Shadow Heroes, a workshop series introducing aspects of translation to GCSE-level students. She is now Managing Editor at the Folio Society. This Tilting World by Colette Fellous, published by Les Fugitives on 16 September, is her latest translation.

Where did you grow up? Have you always lived in London?
I grew up in Islington in North London. I’m happy to call myself a born and bred Londoner, though my parents were not from here, nor were their parents from where they grew up.
I spent my childhood and adolescence in London, and was back and forth between Oxford, Paris and London as a student. My big, very sensible adventure was a move to Rio de Janeiro at the beginning of 2011. My husband got a teaching job there and we took a weekend to decide this was a great plan, despite never having set foot on the continent before. It was a great plan. We stayed for four and a half years. Now we’re back in London we can’t help speculating about making another similar move, though to somewhere as different again. Languages play their part, of course. Continue reading Interview | Sophie Lewis | Translator of the Week

Interview | Jane Draycott, poet & translator

Meet Jane Draycott in person at the tenth and final BookBlast 10×10 Tour talk at  Waterstones, Manchester, Deansgate @waterstonesMCR 6.30 p.m. Thursday 8 November. Theme: Claiming the Great Tradition: Women Recalibrate the Classics. In conversation with Michael Schmidt @Carcanet, chair, and poet, Jenny Lewis. Book Tickets

Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I’m a poet who’s come late to translation and I wish I’d started much much sooner. I teach on a number of different creative writing courses and if I had one thing to advise poetry-writing students it would be to try poetic translation, to discover from the inside the many possible poetries beyond the one in your own ear – soon!

When you were growing up, what books had an impact on you?
Corny but true: Henri Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes; and around the same time, the short stories of Edgar Alan Poe – something in both of those about the fateful and the mysterious which struck me then and has stayed with me.
Continue reading Interview | Jane Draycott, poet & translator

Interview | Nashwa Gowanlock, translator

Meet Nashwa Gowanlock in person at the 10×10 Tour event, Waterstones, Brighton 6.30 p.m. Thursday 4 OCT. Theme: Inside Out: Voices of the Diaspora. With Meike Ziervogel from Peirene Press, chair, and translator Jamie Bulloch (The Last Summer by Ricarda Huch).
Book Tickets

Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I’m a British Egyptian born in Kuwait and raised between there and the UK, where I am now based. I was raised bilingual and attended a British school in Kuwait so the transition to England in 1990 following the Iraqi invasion wasn’t too much of a shock, although it was a bit of a culture shock! Most of my extended family live in Egypt and I have a very strong connection to them and the country itself, even though I never really lived there, but visit often. I’ve also lived as an expat in Qatar and Cyprus, when I worked for Al Jazeera and then AFP, but I’m now settled in Suffolk with my husband, stepson and a toddler who keeps me on my toes!
Continue reading Interview | Nashwa Gowanlock, translator

Interview | Christina Pribićević-Zorić, translator

Meet Christina Pribićević-Zorić in person at the 10×10 Tour event, Waterstones, Nottingham 6.30 p.m. Thursday 27 SEPT. Theme: The End of the World? How the Balkans writes the Holocaust. Book focus: The House of Remembering and Forgetting by Filip David (Serbia) and Doppelgänger by Daša Drndić (Croatia). With Susan Curtis, a translator and founding director of Istros Books, chair, translator Christina Pribićević-Zorić and Georgia de Chamberet (currently translating The Disappearance of Josef Mengele for Verso Books).

Tell us a little bit about yourself
I am from New York. My mother was Irish and my father was from the former Yugoslavia so I had a smattering of Serbo-Croatian when I went to Belgrade on a post-graduate scholarship. I went for a year and stayed for over twenty. Apart from translation, I have worked as a broadcaster and headed the Conference and Language Services Section at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. I now live in London.
Continue reading Interview | Christina Pribićević-Zorić, translator

Interview | Fionn Petch | Translator of the Week

Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I grew up in Scotland but left age sixteen and never really made it back. I lived in Mexico City for about twelve years, and now live in Berlin. I’m a freelance translator from Spanish and French into English.

When you were growing up, what books had an impact on you?
In my teens, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea Trilogy; the John Wyndham novels; most of Orwell; Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian; Calvino’s Invisible Cities; Claudio Magris’ A Different Sea – this last one changed the bearing of my life.

Why do you translate?
I believe translation underlies all communication, both within and between languages. Language is what makes us most distinctively human, and translation is a celebration of that, insofar as it makes all humans intelligible to each other, bringing different life-worlds into proximity. Translators are walkers-between-worlds.

Continue reading Interview | Fionn Petch | Translator of the Week

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