Word for Word Exchange: German
Columbia University School of the Arts & Deutsches Literaturinstitut Leipzig, 2013-2014
In October 2013, two SOA graduate students from the Writing Program traveled to the DLL in Leipzig to meet their German partners and join them in an intensive translation workshop led by the experienced translator Maria Hummitzsch. Their translation collaborations continued remotely through the fall semester, with faculty support provided for the students by their respective institutions.
In late March 2014 the German students came to New York City to take part with the Columbia students in public presentations of their work, and to participate in a final review workshop with Professor Susan Bernofsky, Director of the Writing Program’s Literary Translation program (LTAC).
Columbia University School of the Arts Participants:
NIKA KNIGHT is originally from Boston and lives Portland, Maine. After graduating from Oberlin College with a B.A. in Comparative Literature in 2009, she was awarded a DAAD fellowship to study journalism at the Freie Universität in Berlin. She is a former editor at Full Stop, an online literary magazine, and her writing has been published in Narratively, PLANET, and Sense & Sustainability. Her translation of Svenja Leiber's The Last Country is forthcoming from Seagull Books.
ARTHUR SEEFAHRT resides in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. He is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, with degrees in Western European Intellectual History and Creative Writing. He is a graduate of the MFA Writing Program in Poetry at Columbia University in the City of New York.
DLL Participants:
LILIAN PETER was born in 1981 in Munich. She studied classical piano in high school, and philosophy in Vienna, Tübingen, and Heidelberg, where she received her M.A. in 2009. After traveling and working as a freelance translator in Berlin, she joined the M.A. creative writing program at DLL in 2012. She is concurrently working towards her Ph.D in philosophy, writing on the philosopher and theorist Maurice Blanchot. Her work has been published in various literary magazines, including Lettre International.
DANIEL SCHMIDT was born in 1982, and lives in Leipzig with his son. He received his B.A. in Slavic studies in 2010, and joined the creative writing program at the University of Leipzig in 2012. He is a member of the writer’s collective BUTERBROD, where he works on translations from Russian, and is the editor of the Leipzig-based art and literary magazine FETTLIEBE.
Institutional Partners:
The DEUTSCHES LITERATURINSTITUT LEIPZIG is a central institution at the Universität Leipzig, providing the only degree course for writers in the making in Germany since 1995. Alongside the three-year BA in Creative Writing, focusing on poetry, prose, and drama, an MA in Creative Writing has also been offered since winter of 2009. This is a two-year degree designed as a novel workshop. The aim of the program is to provide students with highly professional writing skills and creative competence, along with a knowledge of literary history and theory.
Columbia University and the DLL gratefully acknowledge the support provided by the U.S. CONSULATE GENERAL LEIPZIG for the workshops held in Leipzig in October, 2013.
Workshop Instructors:
MARIA HUMMITZSCH (Leipzig) was born in 1982 in Magdeburg, and studied in Leipzig, Lisbon and Florianópolis. She works as a literary translator from Portuguese and English into German. She has received fellowships from the German Bundestag, the DAAD, the Robert Bosch Foundation and the German Translators' Fund (DÜF). She currently heads the press office of the Association of German literary translators (VdÜ) and is co-organizer of the German-Brazilian ViceVersa TranslatorGlobal workshops. She lives with her daughter Clara in Leipzig.
SUSAN BERNOFSKY (New York) has translated seven works of fiction by the great Swiss-German modernist author Robert Walser, as well as novels and poetry by Jenny Erpenbeck, Yoko Tawada, Gregor von Rezzori, Uljana Wolf and others. She chairs the PEN Translation Committee and is co-editor (with Esther Allen) of the 2013 Columbia University Press anthology In Translation:Translators on Their Work and What It Means. A 2014 Guggenheim Fellow, she received the 2006 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize and the 2012 Calw Hermann Hesse Translation Prize as well as awards and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the PEN Translation Fund, the NEA, the NEH, the Leon Levy Center for Biography and the Lannan Foundation. In May 2014 she collaborated on a production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute (new libretto translation) with Isaac Mizrahi and John Heginbotham for the Opera Theatre of St. Louis. Her translation of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis appeared with Norton in January 2014, and her translation of Jenny Erpenbeck's The End of Days in November 2014. She blogs about translation at Translationista.