The AUP community is invited to a talk by Peter Wortsman, entitled 'Meditation in Translation - Transcending Ego and Transmitting Voice', which will take place next Monday the 24th at 18:30 in the ARC.
In his remarks, translator-author Peter Wortsman will discuss translation as a form of internal travel, an encounter with "the other" in oneself. Jakob Grimm, of 'Grimms' Fairy Tales' fame, wrote figuratively of the translator: "Whoever has the talent for navigation, whoever is able to man a ship and lead it with full sail to the opposite shore, still has to land where the air and the soil are different." And the poet Goethe, who celebrated that different air and soil in his West‑Östlicher Divan, described "the coming together of the foreign and the native, the unknown approximation and the known, that keep moving towards each other." In that spirit of assimilating ostensibly alien influences, Wortsman will reflect on the task of the translator.
The critically acclaimed translator of classic texts by Peter Altenberg, Adelbert von Chamisso, Heinrich Heine, Heinrich von Kleist, Robert Musil and others, Wortsman is also the author of original work in multiple modes. Often composed in one language and adapted in another, or else inspired by travel, or translation, another form of border crossing, his publications include fiction ('A Modern Way to Die'), memoir ('Ghost Dance in Berlin: A Rhapsody in Gray'), drama ('The Tattooed Man Tells All and Burning Words') and prose poetry. His most recent publications are Selected Tales of the Brothers Grimm (Archipelago) and 'Tales of the German Imagination' (Penguin).