Wort/Word/Worth: A Bilingual Celebration of Translation

Berlin - Apr 3, 2014

featuring Shane Anderson, Katy Derbyshire, Eugene Ostashevsky, Brittani Sonnenberg, and Thomas Pletzinger. View photos here.

Summary

On a Thursday night in an unseasonably balmy April, Berlin's literary and translation enthusiasts got together in an old busdrivers' canteen in the still gentrifying neighborhood of Wedding. Seated at mismatched tables in the 1960s setting, audience members were treated to two panels. The first had Brittani Sonnenberg (novelist, translator, US) and Thomas Pletzinger (novelist, translator, DE) reading from each other's work in translation and discussing (with a little bit of help from Asymptote's senior editor Florian Duijsens) the strange process of being translated and suddenly 'existing' in a different language. Comparisons to basketball abounded, Asymptote's WoW editor Luisa Zielinski took pictures. After a break for East-German sparkling wine and homemade muffins (thanks, Joy Hawley!), the cozy stage was then taken by Asymptote contributors Eugene Ostashevsky (poet, translator, US/RU), Shane Anderson (poet, translator, US), and Katy Derbyshire (translator, blogger, UK), who relished discussing their translating (and being translated by) the great German poet Uljana Wolf (also an Asymptote contributor, though sadly not back in the country yet). The delicate balance between faithfulness and freedom was deliberated, short excerpts were read and enjoyed. Afterwards, audience members and volunteers drank and mingled to the rowdy tones of Slappy Joe Sixpence, the debut of the DJ'ing duo of Derbyshire and Duijsens who spun 1950s soul and reggae classics until the not too wee hours.