Creative Practitioners
Colleagues in and associated with the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies
Peter Arnds (PhD University of Toronto, 1995) is the Director of the MPhil in Comparative Literature and the MPhil in Literary Translation and a Fellow at Trinity College Dublin. He was Professor of German and Italian at Kansas State University until 2008, and has held visiting positions at Colby College, Middlebury College, the University of Kabul, and JNU Delhi. His publications include two monographs, close to 50 peer-reviewed articles on literary criticism, as well as numerous prose pieces and poems. His translation of Patrick Boltshauser’s novel “Stromschnellen” is forthcoming in Dalkey Archive Press, and he is currently seeking publishers for his novel “Searching for Alice” and a monograph entitled “Homo Lupus and the Persecution of Undesirables: A Literary History of the Wolf.”
Vladimir Babkov was Trinity's first Visiting Translator in Residence, appointed in partnership with Dublin UNESCO City of Literature, Dublin City Council and the Ireland Literature Exchange. Vladimir is Master of Literary Translation from English at the Gorky Literary Institute (Moscow). A physicist by training, Vladimir became involved in literary translation as an undergraduate student of the Moscow Physico-Technical Institute where he joined an amateur literary group in the early 80s. He subsequently attended the master classes run by V. Golyshev, one of the outstanding translators of the late Soviet period. Vladimir’s first published translation dates to 1984; his first major publication was Huxley’s The Genius and the Goddess, which appeared in the literary journal Inostrannaya Literatura (Foreign Literature) in 1991. That marked the beginning of his professional career as a translator.
Vladimir Babkov has been awarded the Prize of the Inostrannaya Literatura (Foreign Literature) journal for the best translation of the year (1991), the Inolit Prize (1995), and the Unicorn and Lion award (2007); his work has also been shortlisted for the Little Booker Prize (2001). In July 1995 he was appointed Fellow of the Cambridge Literary Seminar.
Guilherme da Silva Braga is Trinity's fourth Visiting Translator in Residence, appointed by the Centre for Literary Translation (SLLCS) in partnership with Ireland Literature Exchange. Guilherme has been awarded a Master's degree in Comparative Literature and is currently pursuing a Doctorate in English-language Literatures at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in his hometown – the city of Porto Alegre in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Guilherme has translated a total of over thirty novels and short story collections in a wide range of styles, including works by Emily Brontë, beat writer Jack Kerouac, weird fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft and Irishman extraordinaire James Joyce – as well as close to one hundred comic books. He has also been actively involved in the translation of works in which language itself plays a major formal role, such as David Lodge's Deaf Sentence, Edgar Allan Poe's "The Gold-Bug" and the comic book series The Unwritten. Guilherme teaches literary translation at the Translation Studies postgraduate course at the Pontifical Catholic University in Porto Alegre and is currently working on a translation of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Ian Campbell Ross held a personal chair as Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies in Trinity College Dublin until his retirement in 2012; he is now a Fellow Emeritus of the College. Prof. Ross was a co-founder of the Eighteenth-Century Ireland Society/Cumann Eireann san Ochtú Céad Déag and co-founder of the journal Eighteenth-Century Ireland/Iris an dá chultúr which he co-edited 1986-1995. He is the founder and current convenor of the Eighteenth-Century Literature Research Network in Ireland.
Justin Doherty is a lecturer in the Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies, with research interests in twentieth-century Russian literature and culture. As a translator he specialises in the work of Russian emigre writers he has translated works by Georgii Ivanov and Gaito Gazdanov, and is currently working on a translated anthology of shorter works by Russian emigre writers from the 1920s and 30s.
Thomas Kabdebo has been a full-time writer since 2000. He was born in 1934 in Hungary, took part in the 1956 revolution and subsequently fled Hungary. He has lived in Ireland since 1983. Apart from editing and translating the works of Irish poets and Arthur Griffin, he has also translated Hungarian poets into English. His main works are the trilogy Danubius — Danibia, and the Dictionary of Dictionaries. He is a recipient of the Hungarian Order of Merit.
John Kearns is a member of the Executive Committee of the Irish Translators’ and Interpreters’ Association, is general editor of Translation Ireland, and was Programme Co-ordinator at the Irish Writers’ Centre up to December 2012. He holds a PhD in Translation Studies, has translated extensively from Polish to English, and for many years worked as a lecturer and translator trainer in Poland. He is currently a thesis director on the Doctoral Programme in Translation Studies at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain. He has published widely on translation studies, notably the collection Translator and Interpreter Training: Issues, Methods, Debates (Continuum, 2008). From 2004 to 2011 he chaired the Training Committee of the International Association of Translation and Intercultural Studies(IATIS) and also edited the IATIS Bulletin. E-mail: kearns@pro.onet.pl
Jian Lu (Jenny Lu) has a B.A and M.A in English Language & Literature from Shanghai International Studies University. In 2010 she was awarded the 7th CASIO Translation Competition Prize for translating The Use of Poetry by Ian McEwan. In 2012 she was appointed Literary Translator in Residence in Trinity College Dublin. She is currently working as a Literary Translator from English into Chinese. Her major publications include: The Absolutist by John Boyne (in press); Frames Trilogy by John Banville; Christine Falls by Benjamin Black; The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch by Anne Enright; Knots and Cross by Ian Rankin; Her Chinese webpage.
Alexandra Lukes received her Ph.D. in French from New York University in 2012. Her work focuses on the concept of untranslatability and the theoretical implications of translating nonsense, both as a literary genre and as a marginal discourse. She is currently working on Antonin Artaud's translation of Lewis Carroll's "Humpty Dumpty" and on Stéphane Mallarmé's translations of English nursery rhymes and proverbs.
Donal McLaughlin Born in Derry, Donal McLaughlin has lived in Scotland since 1970. The author of an allergic reaction to national anthems & other stories, his second collection is forthcoming from Dalkey Archive early in 2014. Donal also translates from German. Known for his bilingual edition of the poetry of Stella Rotenberg (Shards) and his translations of over 100 German-Swiss writers for the New Swiss Writing anthologies (2008-2011), he also collaborated with Chris Dolan on a stage version of The Reader. He is the voice of Urs Widmer in English - My Father's Book (Seagull) was recently shortlisted for the Best Translated Book Award in the United States. Donal also translates Arno Camenisch, Monica Cantieni, Abbas Khider, Pedro Lenz and Christoph Simon. He featured as both an author and a translator in Best European Fiction 2012 (Dalkey Archive) and maintains a website at donalmclaughlin.wordpress.com
Rachel McNicholl is a freelance translator based in Dublin, Ireland. She holds a BA in German and Italian and an MA in German, both from NUI Galway. Postgraduate studies took her to Switzerland and Germany. She lectured part-time at Hamburg University from 1987 to 1992, teaching translation technique and creative writing to students of English. She also worked in a variety of publishing and media jobs, including four years as desk editor and translator with a bilingual news service run by the German Press Agency (dpa). After moving back to Ireland, Rachel worked as an in-house editor with the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin and Blackstaff Press in Belfast before going freelance. The hats she currently wears include freelance translator, freelance editor, guest lecturer, workshop leader, writing coach, adult literacy tutor.
John Murray was founder-editor of the dual-language online and printed journal Irish Literature in Russian Translation (Irlandskaya Literatura). The first edition appeared in March 2012. The second edition will appear in 2014.
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin has worked in Trinity since her appointment to a Junior Lectureship in English in 1966. She is known as a poet and a translator. She has published or co-published books of poetry translated from Irish, Italian and Romanian, and single poems from French and Latin have appeared in anthologies and magazines. Her recent publications also include essays on translation, and a collection of essays on translation and censorship, edited with Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin and David Parris. She is particularly interested in translation in the sixteenth century, in the motives of translation, and in translation into Irish.
Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin teaches Italian language and literature at Trinity College Dublin, where he also contributes to several MPhil programmes including Literary Translation. A founder member of the Irish Translators' and Interpreters' Association, he is a former Chair of the Irish Writers' Centre. Under the pseudonym Cormac Millar, he has published two crime novels with Penguin Books.
David Parris graduated in French from Oxford in 1969 and undertook research in the field of stylistics (linguistics applied to literary criticism). He has taught translation, among other things for Business Studies and a Language (economics and business) and does translations for international organisations.
Simona Rossi graduated from the MPhil in Literary Translation at TCD in 2006 and is currently working on a PhD on "writers translating writers". The translations she is examining are by well established Italian writers included in the publishing project: "Scrittori tradotti da scrittori", a series exclusively dedicated to authorial translations, initiated by Einaudi publishing house in 1983.
Jennie Rothwell is currently completing a PhD in the Department of Hispanic Studies on Spanish female filmmakers. She has worked as a translator/contributor for a global news website, Dailybabel.com, and is currently part of the translation team of the literary theory journal 452F. She has also worked on theatre translation and art history material for private clients. Her most recent work was for PEN International's 'Write Against Impunity' anthology, marking International Day to End Impunity 2012.
Claudio Sansone grew up between London and Rome. He is currently reading English Studies at TCD, in which he was made Scholar in 2012, and on occasion he can be seen lurking in other departments too. His work revolves around Classical languages and mythology, Old English, Continental European literature and the tradition of the Epic. He has published academic articles in The Trintiy Literary Review and in Labyrinth: A Journal of Postmodern Studies. He has published a number of poems in The Attic (2011-2012), Icarus (2012) and Fuselit (2013). He is currently working on a translation of Boris Vian's poetry which he hopes to have ready by early September. Two of his translations (one a joint collaboration with fellow TCD student Ronan Murphy) are due to be published in the first edition of the Trinity Journal of Literary Translation of which he is the Founding Editor. He has also edited the Attic (2012-2013), and is due to begin his one year term as joint editor of Icarus (with David Lynch, TCD) over the Summer.
Peter Sirr lives in Dublin where he works as a freelance writer and translator. He has taught as Visiting Translator on the Literary Translation MPhil since its inception. A former Director of the Irish Writers' Centre, founder and project manager of The Liffey Project, a multilingual literature site, Peter Sirr is one of Ireland's best-known poets, with five collections to his credit. He is a member of Aosdána. His most recent collection of poems is The Thing Is, published by Gallery Press in 2009, for which he was awarded the Michael Hartnett in 2011. The Gallery Press has also published Marginal Zones (1984), Talk, Talk (1987), Ways of Falling (1991), The Ledger of Fruitful Exchange (1995), Bring Everything (2000), Selected Poems and Nonetheless (both 2004).
Sarah Smyth has worked in the Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies in Trinity College Dublin since 1987. She has produced literal translations of Chekhov’s plays Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard.
Andrew Wilson is a freelance literary translator living in Berkeley, California. His principal area of interest is the contemporary French novel, including writers such as Antoine Volodine, Anne Serre, Lutz Bassmann, Manuela Draeger and Sébastien Brebel. His next publication will be a translation of Sébastien Brebel's novel Villa Bunker (forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press, 2013). He graduated with an MPhil in Literary Translation from Trinity College Dublin in 2010.
Frank Wynne born in Sligo, Frank has been a literary translator for more than fifteen years. He has translated, novels, memoirs, non-fiction and bandes dessinées from French and more recently from Spanish. Early translated works included Atomised by Michel Houellebecq, which won the 2002 IMPAC Prize, and Windows on the World by Frédéric Beigbeder which won the 2005 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. He has spent much of the past decade living in Central and South America, and five years ago began to translate Hispanic fiction. Among the authors he has translated are Ahmadou Kourouma, Boualem Sansal, Claude Lanzmann, Tómas Eloy Martínez and Pablo Picasso. He won the 2008 Scott Moncrieff Prize, and the 2011 Valle Inclán Prize. In 2012 he was made an Honourary Member of the Irish Translators' and Interpreters' Association. A full list of published translations can be found here.
Giuliana Zeuli is the author of a number of translations into Italian (Roddy Doyle, Catherine Dunne, Bernard McLaverty, Irvine Welsh, David Peace, etc.). She has served on the board of ILE; she has been for many years the representative of the Irish Translators and Interpreters' Association on the CEATL (Conseil Europeen des Associations de Traducteurs Litteraires), and for several years, in her role as the ITIA's Coordinator for literary Translation, has organised residencies for foreign literary translators at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annaghmakerrig, with funding from the Kaleidoscope and Ariane projects of the European Union, in cooperation with RECIT (Reseau Europeen des Centres de Traducteurs Litteraires) of which the ITIA and TGC were then joint members.
Jianing Zhou