Festival
An INCITEMENTFOR UTOPIAIN DYSTOPIANTIMES
This year, our festival will focus on utopias and dystopias of the 20th and 21st centuries. From classics by such authors as George Orwell, Ursula K. Le Guin and Karel Čapek through to contemporary voices, we will be building a bridge between reality and fiction, and will let literature inspire us to imagine bold visions for human society and a better future.
Why literary translation?
There is no world literature without translation. Literary translators do not just make texts, ideas and perspectives accessible across linguistic barriers – they also, in so doing, have a crucial influence on how we perceive other cultures. This festival will focus on the work of translators as an artistic practice and act of cultural mediation in its own right – for it is precisely at this present moment, when automatised translation and AI tools are promising simple solutions at the push of a button, that the expertise of human translators is more necessary than ever before.
… save the world?!
“Übersetzen & Weltretten” is a festival organised by the Weltlesebühne e. V. association, and aims to celebrate the diversity of literature in translation and encourage its audience to grapple with the challenges that our society is currently facing. Through a series of discussions, readings, workshops and performances, the festival will reveal how literature itself can be a site of cultural exchange and social action. And at the heart of this project are the creative, political and social dimensions of translation itself. We are keen to explore the question of how language influences our reality – and how literature can change it.
History of the Festival
This festival connects back to the translationale Berlin, a literary translation festival that took place in the city from 2021 to 2023. With “Übersetzen & Weltretten”, the Weltlesebühne e. V. is continuing to develop this format both in terms of content and of form, and is opening it up to changing annual themes and new ways of exploring language, literature and society.
Curators
Hélène Thiérard
Hélène Thiérard (* 1982) is a literary translator and academic, and lives in Berlin.
She translates into French (authors she has worked on include Raoul Hausmann, Franz Kafka and Günter Brus) and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Weltlesebühne e. V. After obtaining her PhD, she taught and researched at the Sorbonne (Paris), the IFK (Vienna) and Saarland University. She now works at Humboldt University in Berlin. Her research interests include multilingual thought and literary translation. Her most recent publications include two articles in TTR.
Current book project: Politics of Language After Universalism, co-edited with Chris Song.
Foto: Hélène Thiérard/ privat
Henning Bochert
Henning Bochert (born in 1969) is a German author, dramaturg and state-certified and authorised translator for English and German, based in Berlin.
After graduating with a degree in acting from the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) in 1994, he has been working for around 30 years as a theatre and literary translator, translating works by authors such as Eve Leigh, Dawn King, Carlos Murillo and Adam Rapp into German, and works by Christoph Hein and Ingrid Lausund into English.
Most recently, he was the translator and editor of Die Rose im Sand (Dörlemann, 2023). He has been a member of Drama Panorama: Forum für Übersetzung und Theater e. V. since 2009, where he regularly organises and hosts events. In 2023, he co-curated the literary translation festival “translationale berlin”.
Foto: Graham Hains
Aurélie Maurin | Gastkuratorin
Aurélie Maurin is a curator, literary translator and publisher, and has lived in Berlin since 2000.
In 2001, she co-founded the VERSschmuggel poetry imprint at Wunderhorn Verlag, which she then edited through to 2017. She manages the TOLEDO programme of the Deutsche Übersetzerfonds, as part of which she initiated the Journale, Cities of Translators, and Toledo Talks series, as well as the JUNIVERS poetry translation congress. In 2021, she and Anja Utler were appointed artistic directors of Lyriktreffen, the poetry congress, in Münster. She also sets poetry to music.
Her most recent publication was JUNIVERS, Urs Engeler Verlag 2022.
Foto: Tobias Bohm