LitTransformer 2023

LitTransformer is an international translation workshop that fosters collaboration among translators from various UNESCO Cities of Literature (“CoL”), stressing the importance of literary translation and its power as a regenerative commons. The project was started by Lviv CoL and is being continued under the guidance of Ljubljana CoL.

July 2–10, 2023, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Mentors: Aron Aji, the Director of Center for Translation and Global Literacy, and Translation Programs at the University of Iowa, and Matthias Göritz, professor of Practice of Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis.

LitTranformer 2023 is organized by Ljubljana CoL with Lviv CoL as partners. The organizers would like to acknowledge that LitTransformer 2023 is a continuation of the LitTransformer project, developed by Lviv CoL.

Topic: ‘Passages of Survival’

Cities are living organisms, constantly reshaped by all forms of violence. However, cities are also creative transformation zones, capable of spurning creative anarchies with regenerative potential. Now, in times of world crises, and particularly one of the biggest wars since the Second World War in the center of Europe – the war in Ukraine – cities will once again speak and hear each other. LitTransformer aims to reflect on the recuperative possibilities of literature and foster translation as cross-cultural dialogue, thus emphasizing the opportunities for empathy.

Toward this aim, the workshop sets out to create an engaging cross-cultural environment where participants are asked to interact creatively by translating poetry from represented CoLs.

Participants will work in pairs across three languages: their two native languages as well as English, the bridge between them. Each participant will be both a guide into their own urban imaginary (in their native language) and a novice traveler into a foreign one (in their partner’s language). Interrogating their own subjectivities, participating translators will be moving between familiarity and estrangement, experiencing both languages vividly and reflectively.

More information in the application form.