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A meditation on loss and recovery through the act of translation and its recuperative powers.Cécile Wajsbrot will discuss "Nevermore." She will be joined in conversation by the translator, Tess Lewis. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion.
At the Tea Room (2nd Floor) in the Social Sciences Research Building
About the Book
An unnamed translator mourning the loss of a close friend retreats to Dresden to translate the "Time Passes" section of Virginia Woolf's novel "To the Lighthouse." Translating this lyrical evocation of time and its devastations in a city with which the writer has no connections and where neither her language nor Woolf's are spoken offers an interruption to the course of her life. She immerses herself in this prose poem of ephemerality.
The narrator delves into phrases from "Time Passes" and subjects them to the inexact science and imperfect art of translation. This, in turn, leads her to wide-ranging reflections on other instances of loss, destruction, and recovery--the Chernobyl disaster, the High Line in New York City, the bombing of Dresden and Wallmann's commemorative Bell Requiem Dresden, the evacuation of the Hebridean island Foula, Hiroshi Sugimoto's photographs of seascapes, Debussy's "La cathédrale engloutie," and Ceri Richards's series of paintings by the same name. She reflects on places that are destined for decay and yet are returning to life, broken worlds in which there is still strength for a new beginning. In Tess Lewis's visionary English translation, Cécile Wajsbrot's lyrical exploration of the role of the writer and translator becomes an exquisite meditation on loss and recovery.
About the Author
Cécile Wajsbrot was born in Paris in 1954. She writes novels, sometimes essays, radio dramas. In her five novels cycle about art the last one, "Destruction," evokes a dystopic dictature in France forbidding all kind of arts except entertainment. "Nevermore" (2021 translated into English by Tess Lewis in 2024), deals with the process of translation). "Plein Ciel" (2024) with an unsolved air crash. Her seminaries in Berlin, Dresden or Innsbruck have been dealing with climate in literature and natural catastrophes as well as with migration. She translates from the English (Virginia Woolf) and the German (Peter Kurzeck), lives both in Paris and Berlin.
About the Translator
Tess Lewis is a writer and translator from French and German. Her translations include works by Peter Handke, Walter Benjamin, Ingeborg Bachmann and Montaigne. A Guggenheim, NEA and Berlin Prize Fellow, she won the 2017 PEN Award for Translation. She is an Advisory Editor for The Hudson Review and co-curator of the Festival Neue Literature, New York City’s only German language literature festival. www.tesslewis.org
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
UChicago Social Sciences, 1126 E 59th St,Chicago, Illinois, United States
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