The studio offers workshops, lectures, discussions and networking
The first Balkan Studio for Literary Translation Vice Versa offers workshops, lectures, discussions and networking to literary translators from Bulgaria and the Western Balkans working with Bulgarian and the languages of the WB and vice versa.
The studio will take place between Sept 15 – Sept 19 and Sept 22 – Oct 2 2022 in Sofia, Bulgaria. It is organized by Next Page Foundation.
The studio is designed to be equally beneficial for both translators at the beginning of their careers and for experienced and published professionals.
The participants will be working in multi-language and multicultural environment and will become acquainted with what is new in the contemporary Bulgarian literature scene. They will have the opportunity to meet colleagues and to network and share professional experiences.
The literary translation workshops are at the core of the programme and include hands-on sessions on participants’ translations with experienced mentors, consensus translation of excerpts, vice versa translation.
The studio parallel programme offers lectures, professional discussions, meetings with writers and editors.
The mentors of the studio are professional literary translators from Bulgaria and the Balkans. Read more about them below:
Ksenija Banovic has graduated from the Department of Croatian Studies at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb, and specialized in Bulgarian language and literature at the Sofia University. She has translated numerous contemporary Bulgarian novels into Croatian. In 2016 Ksenija won the Literary Prize of the Bulgarian National Book Center in 2016 in the category ‘Translation’. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Croatian P.E.N. Center.
Nikola Madzirov is a poet, essayist, translator from North Macedonia. He was born in 1973 in Strumica in the family of war refugees from the Balkan Wars. When he was 18, the collapse of Yugoslavia prompted a shift in his sense of identity – as a writer reinventing himself in a country which felt new but was still nourished by deeply rooted historical traditions. His poems are translated into more than forty languages and are awarded with numerous international prizes. Nikola translates from Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, Bulgarian and English. Among the authors he had translated are Yehuda Amichai, Louise Glück, Vasko Popa, Li-Young Lee, Slavenka Drakulić, Ana Ristović, Faruk Šehić. Nikola Madzirov is also the first translator of Georgi Gospodinov intro Macedonian. He is the translator of the poetry of Silvia Choleva, Ekaterina Yosifova, Mirela Ivanova, Boyko Lambovski, Nikolay Boykov.
Rusana Hristova-Bejleri, Ph.D, is an Assoc. Prof. of Albanian Language and Literature at the Sofia University St Kliment Ohridski. She is a scholar, interpreter and literary translator, co-author of Balkan Idioms Dictionary (Tirana, 1999), author of ‘Albanian Literature as a Mirror of National Character’ (Sofia, 2009) and the newly published monograph on life and works of Albanian writer Thoma Kacori in Bulgaria (Sofia, 2022) with open access in Albanian here. Her latest literary translation is Stefan Çapaliku’s novel ‘Each one gets crazy in their own way’ (Sofia, Ergo, 2022).
Rusanka Lyapova believes that all true things pass through the heart, sharing her love for words between translating and teaching. She has taught at the National Military School in Veliko Tarnovo, at the Plovdiv and Sofia Universities, and currently teaches at the Military Academy in Sofia. She has translated over 40 books from South Slavic languages -Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Macedonian, mostly by contemporary authors, including mainly prose and less often poetry and drama. Rusanka has been honored by the Bulgarian Translators’ Union with various translation awards.
The Balkan Studio for Literary Translation Vice Versa is part of the Translation in Motion project (1/2/21-31/8/23) co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.
