18. Oktober 2024
Words of welcome on the occasion of the anniversary of translation funding of the Goethe-Institut
- The spoken word prevails -
I am delighted to welcome you here today to celebrate together: the 50th anniversary of the Goethe-Institut’s translation funding program and the 20th anniversary of Litrix.de. These two milestones are an opportunity to recognize the immense importance of literature and literary translation for international cultural exchange.
In 2003, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade was awarded to the great author and cultural critic Susan Sontag. She presented her acceptance speech in Frankfurt under the motto “Literature is freedom”. Through the exchange with exiled European writers and thinkers, whom she had met in America in her early youth, she had learned not to succumb to the compulsion of national vanity. The exchange of literatures through the centuries, Sontag argued, has formed the bed through which the stream of understanding can flow today. Literature was and is the passport to the sphere of freedom. Elsewhere, Susan Sontag emphasized: “Literature is the house of nuance, and contrariness against the voices of simplification”. Access to world literature was particularly important to her.
These considerations are highly topical today in the face of increasing nationalistic compartmentalization and the great seductive power of ideological simplification. And for us to be able to read the world’s literatures, we need translation. “Translation is the circulatory system of the world’s literatures”, wrote Susan Sontag in her essay ‘The World as India’ (published posthumously in 2007). “Literary translation [...] is preeminently an ethical task, and one that mirrors and duplicates the role of literature itself, which is to extend our sympathies; to educate the heart and mind; to create inwardness; to secure and deepen the awareness (with all its consequences) that other people, people different from us, really do exist.”
The Goethe-Institut’s translation funding program has been contributing to this important global literary “circulatory system” for fifty years. It supports publishers worldwide who wish to translate German-language works into their respective national languages by subsidizing translation fees. In this way, around 300 translations of fiction, children’s and young adult books, comics and non-fiction are published every year. These include, for example, Jenny Erpenbeck’s “Kairos”, translated into Dutch and six other languages; the first translation of Thomas Mann’s works into Azerbaijani; Andreas Steinhöfel’s “Rico and Oskar” books into Vietnamese and Friederike Otto’s work “Climate Injustice” into English.
For twenty years, the Litrix program has been actively encouraging the translation of current German-language literature into different languages. Litrix facilitates encounters between authors, translators and readers in very different linguistic and cultural areas. And after Arabic, Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian and Greek, the current focus is on the Italian language.
The Italian translations of Jens Balzer’s “Ethics of Appropriation” and Charlotte Gneuss’ novel “Gittersee”, among others, were supported. Silvia Albesano translated Gneuss’ impressive debut, and we have just had the pleasure of meeting Silvia in conversation with Charlotte Gneuss and her Norwegian translator colleague Merete Franz. In this conversation, the diverse approaches to a literary text and its historical context became clear—and that is the core of cultural exchange, i.e. the exchange on topics and discourses that concern not only us in Germany, but also readers all over the world.
The Goethe-Institut has repeatedly honored the great importance of translation work and the eminent role of translators in international cultural exchange by awarding a Goethe Medal. This year, too, one of the Goethe Medals went to the literary translator Claudia Cabrera from Mexico, who translated, among others, Anna Segher’s exile works “Transit” and “The Seventh Cross” into Mexican Spanish. “Literary translation is indispensable for the transfer of knowledge,” says Claudia Cabrera. “Without it, we would all only read and learn in the languages we know ourselves and would have no access to other languages, worlds and cultures. It is thanks to literary translators that there is a world culture. Without special funding programs, it would be much more difficult to have important books translated,” Cabrera points out, “as the financial situation of publishers is unfortunately often precarious.”
The promotion of translations is one of the core tasks of the Goethe-Institut with regard to international literary exchange. No other institution in Germany promotes translation to this extent. Moreover, translation promotion is one of the most sustainable cultural programs. The translated book or e-book remains permanently available. The approximately 7,000 translations funded since 1974 could fill around 220 meters of shelves—a very impressive and polyphonic library of German-language literature in translation!
In this context, special thanks are due to the Volker and Vera Doppelfeld Foundation, which works intensively to promote young translators. The collaboration on the “New German Voices” project has enabled young Italian translators to translate four outstanding literary debuts from Germany.
Translations convey ideas. They contribute to changes in perspective. They cross cultural and political boundaries. And they promote debates on current literary and social issues. The promotion of translation is therefore an important pillar of international cultural exchange, for which the Goethe-Institut stands. In this way, the institute ensures literary variety and promotes awareness of German-language literature abroad. And it contributes to a world of diversity and dialogue.
Let us now raise our glasses to the authors and translators around the world and to their works in a wide variety of languages, which continue to open up new perspectives on our own and other cultures!