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Creative Practitioners

Peter Arnds
Patricia González Jian Lu
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
Claudio Sansone
Vladimir Babkov
Graham Harrison
Alexandra Lukes
Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin
Fuat Sevimay
Matías Battistón
Thomas Kabdebó
Brigit McCone
David Parris
Guilherme da Silva Braga
Barry Keane
Donal McLaughlin
Simona Rossi
Frank Wynne
Ian Campbell Ross
John Kearns
Rachel McNicholl
Jennie Rothwell
Andrew Wilson
Justin Doherty
Débora Landsberg
John Murray
Peter Sirr
Giuliana Zeuli

Peter Arnds (PhD University of Toronto, 1995), Associate Professor and Fellow, is the Director of Trinity's MPhil in Comparative Literature. He has been Visiting Professor at Middlebury College, the University of Kabul, JNU Delhi, and the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide. He is the author of Intertextuality in Wilhelm Raabe and Charles Dickens (Peter Lang, 1997), Representation, Subversion and Eugenics in Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum (Camden House 2004), and Lycanthropy in German Literature (Palgrave Macmillan 2015). He edited Translating Holocaust Literature (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015), and translated Patrick Boltshauser's novel Stromschnellen (Rapids, Dalkey Archive Press, 2014, longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award). A member of the PEN Centre, he has published prose and poetry in various literary journals, and was a writer-in-residence at the Heinrich Böll Cottage on Achill Island (Mayo). His collection of poetry A Rare Clear Day appeared in RedFox Press in 2015.

Vladimir Babkov was our first visiting translator-in-residence, appointed in partnership with Dublin UNESCO City of Literature, Dublin City Council and Ireland Literature Exchange. Vladimir has a Masters in Literary Translation from English from 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 master classes run by V. Golyshev, one of the outstanding translators of the late Soviet period. Vladimir’s first major publication was Huxley’s The Genius and the Goddess, which appeared in the literary journal Inostrannaya Literatura (Foreign Literature) in 1991. Vladimir was 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.

Matías Battistón is a literary translator and also lectures in translation studies at the University of Belgrano. He has translated works by John Cage, Marcel Proust, Victor Hugo, Gustave Flaubert, Fredric Jameson, Paul Valéry, James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Ed Wood, and Marshall McLuhan among others.
Here are some links to his translations:
http://interzonaeditora.com/ca…/narrativa-143/bug-jargal-384
https://www.facebook.com/cajanegraeditora/photos/p.1178504358830155/1178504358830155/?type=3&theater
http://www.edicionesgodot.com.ar/…/las-artes-decorativas-la…
http://lamarcaeditora.com/catalogo/ensayo-185/inedito-1048

Guilherme da Silva Braga was the fourth translator-in-residence hosted by Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation in partnership with Ireland Literature Exchange. Guilherme has 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 – Porto Alegre in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Guilherme has translated 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, dgar 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 at 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 Trinity's 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 émigré writers. He has translated works by Georgii Ivanov and Gaito Gazdanov, and is currently working on a translated anthology of shorter works by Russian emigré writers from the 1920s and 1930s.

Patricia González Bermúdez has been teaching Spanish language and cultural studies at Trinity College Dublin since 2007. She holds a BA in English Studies (UAM, Spain), an MPhil in Literary Translation (Trinity) and is currently pursuing a PhD in the Department of Hispanic Studies of Trinity College on a Comparative Study of Spanish Translations of Jane Eyre (1847). She is also a freelance translator and collaborated with Irish poet Seamus Cashman in translating poetry by Cuban writer José Manuel Poveda for a collection published in 2016. She is an editor of the student-run Trinity Journal of Literary Translation and a bilingual magazine based in New York called El Token to which she has contributed literary translations of Charlotte Brontë’s poetry and Maeve Brennan’s short stories.

Graham Harrison is a retired lecturer in German and Russian at Letterkenny Institute of Technology (LYIT). Since his retirement in 2008, Graham has spent a lot of time translating Russian poetry, including the work of early 20th-century poet Maximillian Voloshin. Graham's translations of the Voloshin sonnets entitled "Corona astralis" were published in the literary/cultural almanach "Sub rosa 5" (Kiev, 2013). Graham's translation of Voloshin's "Дом поэта" is accessible in the web journal: https://sites.google.com/site/hermisium/ Graham is currently working on a version of Voloshin's sonnets entitled "Lunaria" and his lyric "To those who come after". Graham Harrison has recently completed the following translations of fifteen Anna Akhmatova lyrics and her 1963-5 cycle of short poems "Night verses".

Thomas Kabdebó 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.

Barry Keane is a lecturer in Translation and Comparative Studies at the Institute of English Studies at the University of Warsaw. He has published new translations of The Threnodies, a monumental cycle of laments for a lost daughter by the Polish Renaissance poet Jan Kochanowski (1530-1584), and Orphan Girl, an autobiographical epic poem by Polish aristocrat Anna Stanisławska (1651-1751) about a coerced marriage. It is a poetic account that represents a remarkable tale of triumph in the face of overwhelming domestic oppression. The manner by which Stanisławska wrested back control over her life was an unprecedented feat for a woman in the time in which she lived, for not only did she escape the clutches of a feared magnate family but managed to secure a divorce and marry “for love” soon afterwards.

  • Grief – Anger - Acceptance. Jan Kochanowski’s “Threnodies”.  A verse translation with Introduction and Commentary (Warsaw: Sub Lupa 2016).
  • Anna Stanisławska. Orphan Girl. The Aesop Episode. Verse translation, introduction, and commentary (The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series 45. Iter Academic Press: Toronto, Ontario & Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies: Tempe, Arizona 2016).

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

Débora Landsberg was awarded a Master's degree in Translation Studies by PUC-Rio (Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro) in 2016. She began to translate books from English into Portuguese in 2005, while still pursuing her BA in English and Portuguese Studies. Since then, she has been responsible for the Brazilian Portuguese translations of works by Charles Dickens, Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood, Lionel Shriver, Shirley Jackson and Anne Enright.

Jian Lu (Jenny Lu) has a BA and MA 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 at 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.

Alexandra Lukes received her BA from Oxford University, her maîtrise from the University of Paris III and her PhD from New York University. She is Assistant Professor of French and Translation Studies at Trinity College Dublin. Her work focuses on the relationship between literature and madness, on the concept of untranslatability and on the theoretical implications of translating nonsense, both as a literary genre and as a marginal discourse. She has published on Antonin Artaud’s translations of Lewis Carroll, and is writing on Stéphane Mallarmé’s translations of English nursery rhymes and proverbs. She is currently editing a collection of essays, entitled Nonsense, Madness, and the Limits of Translation (forthcoming in Translation Studies). She is the founding director of the network “Translation Limits”. Other research areas include translation theory, marginal forms of writing, relations between literature, psychoanalysis and the visual arts. She has taught classes on madness and poetry, madness and autobiography, Surrealism and outsider art.

Brigit McCone is a graduate of the Russian Department at Trinity College. She has worked as a professional translator from Russian and Ukrainian, and is also a writer of original works: two radio serials for the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, three plays (which she also directed) and a short film which was screened at the Baltimore Women's Film Festival (USA). She is particularly interested in poetry translation and in the works of Vladimir Vysotsky, Daniil Kharms, Nikolai Gogol, Mikhail Lermontov and Vasyl Strus. Brigit’s translations include ‘The Sea, An Elegy’ by Vasily Zhukovsky, extracts from Alexander Griboedov’s play 'Woe from Wit', Daniil Kharms’s short story ‘Tumbling Biddies’, the song ‘Paper Soldier’ by Bulat Okudzhava, the lyric poem 'Rain whips my face...' by Bella Akhmadulina, two of Vladimir Vysotsky’s songs ‘Wolf Hunt’ and ‘I Love You Now’ and Yuri Entin’s ‘Song of the Crafty Cat’ (from 'The Light Blue Puppy' cartoon, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=To2csb4eK-o)

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 appeared in 2014.

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin has worked at Trinity College since her appointment to a Junior Lectureship in English in 1966. 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 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. She is currently Ireland Professor of Poetry, and Professor Emeritus of English at Trinity College.

Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin retired from Trinity College Dublin in September 2016, after more than 30 years in the Department of Italian. A founder member of the Irish Translators' and Interpreters' Association, and a former chairman of the Irish Writers' Centre, he has been active at various times as a translator and as a crime novelist, with two books published by Penguin under the pseudonym Cormac Millar. His main areas of research are Boccaccio, translation, Dante, and creative writing (especially fiction). He has worked on several edited collections of research, including Italian Storytellers, co-edited with Eric Haywood (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1989); Dante and the Middle Ages: Literary and Historical Essays, co-edited with John Barnes (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1995); The Languages of Ireland, co-edited with Michael Cronin (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003); Patterns in Dante: Nine Literary Essays, co-edited with Jennifer Petrie (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005); Translation and Censorship, co-edited with Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and David Parris (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2009); and Translation Right or Wrong, co-edited with Susana Bayó Belenguer and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin (Dublin: Four Courts Press 2013). One of his larger projects was a new English version of Boccaccio's Decameron, based on John Payne's 1886 translation (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2004). He contributed an essay on "Translating Boccaccio" to the Cambridge Companion to Boccaccio (2015). He has greatly enjoyed teaching and interacting with generations of Trinity students and academic colleagues, and continues to contribute to several MPhil programmes, including our MPhil in Literary Translation.

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 Trinity's MPhil in Literary Translation 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 read English Studies at Trinity College and was made a Scholar in 2012. 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 Trinity 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 has worked on a translation of Boris Vian's poetry. Two of his translations (one a joint collaboration with fellow Trinity student Ronan Murphy) were published in the first edition of the student-run Trinity Journal of Literary Translation of which he is the Founding Editor. He has also edited The Attic (2012-2013) and Icarus (with David Lynch, TCD).

Peter Sirr lives in Dublin where he works as a freelance writer and translator. He has taught as Visiting Translator on the MPhil in Literary Translation 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 Poetry Award 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. He published a translation of Sébastien Brebel's novel Villa Bunker (Dalkey Archive Press, 2013). He graduated with an MPhil in Literary Translation from Trinity College Dublin in 2010.

Frank Wynne is one of Ireland's best known literary translators. 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, Pablo Picasso, Virginie Despentes, Javier Cercas and Emiliano Monge. He won the 2008 Scott Moncrieff Prize, and the 2011 Valle Inclán Prize. In 2012 he was made an Honorary 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; for many years she has been the representative of the Irish Translators' and Interpreters' Association at CEATL (Conseil Européen des Associations de Traducteurs Littéraires), and for several years, in her role as the ITIA's coordinator for literary translation, she 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 (Réseau Européen des Centres de Traducteurs Littéraires) of which the ITIA and TGC were joint members.

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