ACFNY RECOMMENDS | BOOK LAUNCH | ELFRIEDE JELINEK: “HER NOT ALL HER”
The Austrian Cultural Forum is pleased to recommend the U.S.- book launch of the new English translation of Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek’s play Her Not All Her- on/with Robert Walser [in the original: er nicht als er- zu/mit Robert Walser]. The award-winning translation by Damion Searls was recently published in the Cahier series by Sylph Editions in collaboration with the American University of Paris.
Damion Searls received the 2011 ACF Translation Prize for his translation of Her Not All Her, Jelinek’s play about, from, and to the great Swiss writer Robert Walser. Searls will be participating in this event alongside editor Daniel Medin, and novelist Katie Kitamura. The reading takes place with the support of the journal The American Reader which will be publishing an excerpt of the play in their magazine.
ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS
Damion Searls is a writer in English and translator from German, French, Dutch, and Norwegian. He attended Harvard University, studying German philosophy, as well as receiving an education in American literature at UC Berkeley. Searls has translated writers including Proust, Rilke, Robert Walser, Ingeborg Bachmann, Thomas Bernhard, Kurt Schwitters, Peter Handke, Christa Wolf, Stephane Hessel, Jon Fosse, and Nescio and edited a one-volume abridged edition of Thoreau’s Journal; his translation of Hans Keilson’s Comedy in a Minor Key was a New York Times Notable Book of 2010 and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist in Fiction. His own work includes What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going (short stories) and pieces in Harper’s, The Believer, n+1, Bookforum, The Paris Review, and elsewhere.
Editor Daniel Medin studied at the University of Connecticut and holds a MA and PhD from the Washington University in St. Louis. He has taught comparative and English literature at Stanford University and at Washington University in St. Louis, and at the American University of Paris. He is the assistant editor of the Cahiers Series, a series of booklets of 36-48 pages that tries to make available new explorations in writing and translating. In 2010 Daniel Medin published his study Three Sons: Franz Kafka and the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee, Philip Roth, and W. G. Sebald.
Author and critic Katie Kitamura studied at Princeton University and the University of London before becoming an Honorary Research Fellow at the London Consortium. Her novel The Longshot, published in 2009, was chosen as a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award and is currently being developed into a feature film by Peter Berg. It was followed by her second novel Gone to the Forest, a psychological examination of the destruction of a family, in 2012. In addition to her fictional works Kitamura has written for The New York Times, The Guardian and Wired, while regularly contributing to Frieze and Art Monthly.
ABOUT THE ACF TRANSLATION PRIZE
In collaboration with the Dietrich W. Botstiber Foundation, the annual ACF Translation Prize honors excellent translations of contemporary Austrian fiction, poetry, and drama which have not previously appeared in English. A grant of € 3,000 is disbursed upon the formal acceptance of the manuscript by a publisher, which must occur within three years. Due to budgetary constraints, the ACF Translation Prize has been suspended until further notice.
The ACF Translation Prize, created in 2009 to help facilitate cultural exchange, hopes to assist in the challenging task of translating a literary text, which entails not merely linguistically rendering it from German into English, but also conveying concepts and images from one cultural context to another. Previous winners were Jean Snook, for her translation of Gert Jonke’s The Distant Sound, which won the 2009 ACF Translation Prize, and has since been published by the prestigious Dalkey Archive Press. Last year’s winner was David Dollenmayer, for his translation of Michael Köhlmeier’s novella Idyll with Drowning Dog, which was enthusiastically reviewed for its precise and evocative language.
VENUE
McNally Jackson Books
52 Prince Street
(betw. Lafayette & Mulberry)
New York, NY 10012
Free admission.
Tickets are first-come, first-served.
>> More information: mcnallyjackson.com