Given the COVID-19 pandemic, we have decided to move our events online.
Next week, we will have our first digital event. On Monday (May 4, 13-14:00pm), the Discussion Group welcomes Dr Margherita Laera who will discuss theatre and translation. The event will be live-streamed via Microsoft Teams. To register by 3 May, please email: mariachiara.leteo@lincoln.ox.ac.uk with the email subject line: ‘Laera - Discussion Group registration’.
Oxford Translation Day will now take place as online sessions over a series of weeks, culminating with the announcement of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize shortlist on 13 June. We will also make recordings of some of Oxford Translation Day’s online sessions available on the OCCT website on 13 June. For further details and to register, please go to the individual events on our events page: https://www.occt.ox.ac.uk/events.
EVENTS and Call for Submissions
1. Queen’s Translation Exchange – International Book Club
The International Book Club's next meeting will be on Wednesday 20th May at 8pm. We will be reading Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon (Daunt Books), translated from Italian by Jenny McPhee. The translator will be with us live for the discussion, which will take place via Zoom.
Please email translation.exchange@queens.ox.ac.uk to be sent the Zoom event link. You can also join the conversation in our Facebook group and by following us on Twitter. All welcome!
Natalia Ginzburg wrote her masterful autobiographical novel Family Lexicon while living in London in the 1960s. Homesick for her Italian family, she summoned them in this celebration of the routines and rituals, in-jokes and insults and, above all, the repeated sayings that make up every family.
Jenny McPhee is a translator and the author of the novels The Center of Things, No Ordinary Matter, and A Man of No Moon. She is the director of the Center of Applied Liberal Arts at New York University and lives in New York.
In June, we will be joined by translators Bjørg Arnadottir and Andrew Cauthery to talk about And the Wind See All by Icelandic author Guðmundur Andri Thorsson. The provisional meeting date is Wednesday 17th June.
The International Book Club is part of the Queen’s College Translation Exchange, which brings together expertise in literary translation and outreach within the College, University, city, and country to develop a broad programme of translation-related activities for students, schools, and the public.
2. The BCLA is also moving online: we are setting up a "Culture and Quarantine" section, with a call for people's reflections, thoughts, poems, translations concerning their present experiences of the present situation brought about by the coronavirus: https://bcla.org/culture-and-quarantine/
There is also another section with a compilation of 1000-word reflections, including one submitted by Andrew Motion, also on their experiences of lockdown:
https://bcla.org/culture-and-confinement/. Anyone is welcome to contribute to both.
