Name: Traducir o perder pie - Corinna Gepner
SKU: TRADUCIR-CORINNAGEPNER
Price: 13.0 GBP
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Traducir o perder pie - Corinna Gepner

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Traducir o perder pie
By Corinna Gepner

IN SPANISH

Publisher: EME (Argentina)

An essay on translation as a work of intimacy and exploration, this piece is written by the first French speaker in a family whose history is intertwined with cities that served as crossroads for those fleeing the Second World War, between Germany, Poland, and France. Corinna Gepner unfolds a patchwork notebook, revealing what the act of translating can do to memory and to life. Between French and German, translating is to provoke a chain of tremors: to bring forth the echoes of a war she did not witness but which marked her grandparents' history—their escapes, their absences, their gambles—and to shatter the very ground that sustains her French, a language without roots.

The book revisits versions of Kafka, Goethe, Novalis, Eichendorff, Hilde Domin, and Heinrich Gerlach to tell us that translating literature is an exercise that occurs in the secret union of vertigo and patience, that achieving an encounter between languages means accepting that one has already lost before beginning; this is the starting point for insisting on the intentional dissolution of the certainties of the past and of language. Not-knowing is the principle and method of translation: “a slow and systematic destruction of what one thought one knew, or of what one hoped to know,” Gepner tells us. Only in this way can the exercise become an approach.

In reflecting on her translation work, Corinna constructs a precarious framework on which to support her desire to touch others, to brush against their indelible and opaque image. The displacement between languages keeps the writing afloat, and with a delicate gesture, she raises from the sunken memory her fragile narrative, the stratum where language is made of affection and gaps.