by Kate Deimling
ATA66 in Boston was a great conference, with lots of goings-on for the Literary Division.
Our distinguished speaker, Larissa Kyzer, gave two terrific presentations, on “Throwing Spaghetti at the Wall: Making Big Choices in Literary Translation” and “Finding and Building Community as a Freelance Translator.”
The distinguished speakers of the Korean Division, Slavic Division, and Portuguese Division all gave talks on literary translation, showing what a vital role our field plays within ATA.
The Portuguese Language Division’s distinguished speaker Flora Thomson-DeVeaux discussed her translation of Brazilian writer Machado de Assis’s masterpiece The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas.
Presentations on book translation and literary translation were given by speakers including Stelyios Muksuris, Bo Ai, Shelley Fairweather-Vega, Maggie Smith, Laurie Bennett, and Cecilia Solís-Bautista & Gabriel González Nuñez.
Shelley Fairweather-Vega discussing her translation of We Computers (a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature)
Matt Griffin presented the Ungar Translation Award to Tess Lewis for her translation of Lutz Seiler’s novel Star 111. Unfortunately, Tess was unable to receive the award in person, but Matt read her very thoughtful and heartfelt acceptance speech.
Andrea Nemeth-Newhauser organized another great edition of the After Hours Café, featuring readings of translations from German, Portuguese, French, Korean, Russian, Uzbek, Icelandic, and more.
We enjoyed a lively lunch at Porter Square Books on the waterfront, where Shelley Fairweather-Vega passed the baton to Kate Deimling and Petra Rieker, the Lit Div’s incoming administrator and assistant administrator.
Shelley introducing Kate and Petra
The café at Porter Square Books, site of the Lit Div lunch
A great group at the Lit Div lunch