Generation X-pat: Travel, Translation, and the Post-communist World

The ability to travel, to cross borders both linguistic and geopolitical, is crucial to translators.

For Gen-X translators (i.e. translators who graduated college in roughly 1987-2002) interested in Soviet-bloc languages and cultures, the opening of these specific borders in this specific era meant new levels of access and experience that shaped our careers. The post-1989 explosion of movement, dislocation, and travel affected not only the places we went then, but the places we’re in now. Four US-trained Gen-X scholars and translators living in the US, Turkey, and Sweden working in languages from Romanian to Russian to Slovak discuss how we’ve carried meaning (and other baggage) through the post-Communist world: how did the new freedoms to travel present new challenges to translation?

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Moderator

In 2019 Anne O. Fisher’s translations included Monitor-1 by Shura Burtin (winner of the inaugural True Story Award for long-form journalism); Nervous, a one-act play by Julia Lukshina (Asymptote); and poetry and prose by Ilya Danishevsky and Dmitry Kuzmin in Life Stories, Death Sentences: Contemporary Russian-Language LGBTQ+ Writing (In Translation).

Presenters

Sean Cotter is Professor of Literature and Translation Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. Winner of the Best Translated Book Award, he translates from Romanian: T. O. Bobe’s Curl (Wakefield, 2019), Mircea Cărtărescu’s Blinding (Archipelago Books, 2013), and Magda Cârneci’s FEM (Deep Vellum, forthcoming 2021). Julie Hansen received her PhD from the University of Michigan and is now Associate Professor of Slavic Languages at Uppsala University in Sweden. Her research interests include translation and literary multilingualism. Her most recent article is “Transcending the Vernacular in Fictional Portraits of Translators” (available open access). Charles Sabatos (PhD, University of Michigan) is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Yeditepe University (Istanbul). His recent monograph “Frontier Orientalism and the Turkish Image in Central European Literature” is an expanded English edition of the original (published in Turkish translation). He is currently translating two classic Slovak novels.