ELKOST International literary agency - Master-class by Elena Kostioukovich in Ca' Foscari University

On Оctober 13-17, Elena Kostioukovich will be conducting a master-class "Tools used for literary translation in XXI century" at the Ca' Foscari University (Venice, Italy).

See http://www.unive.it for details.

Titolo: Strumenti del traduttore letterario nel XXI secolo.

Docente: prof. Elena Kostioukovitch

Date: 13-17 ottobre 2014, incontri quotidiani di 3 ore ciascuno

Temi del seminario:

Giorno 1) Capire le regole dell'editoria: concetti base della collaborazione tra il traduttore e il Publisher.

Giorno 2) Sapere pescare nell'internet: vocabolari, enciclopedie, nomenclatori, traduttori automatici, database, dizionari delle rime e vari espedienti magici che sono in base ad ogni gran successo.

Giorno 3) Consultare libri, film e documenti. Contestualizzare in ogni modo ogni cosa. Un viaggio vero o immaginario che ci tocca compiere per fare bene ogni traduzione e/o traduzioncina.

Giorno 4) Tecniche specifiche, precisione, algoritmi. Traduzione poetica, traduzione di narrativa corta, traduzione di narrativa lunga, traduzione di opere di saggistica.

Giorno 5) Intuito, memoria, gusto, stile. Diventare creativi rimanendo disciplinati. Dieci leggi per evitare la noia e la disperazione.

Featured titles

Soviet Education, a novel by Olga Medvedkova

Rights sold: France - Alain Baudry & Cie Editeur, Spain - Acantilado

Prix Révélation de la Société des gens de lettres (2014, France)

Summer 1980: Moscow prepares for the Olympics at great risk, in the midst of the war in Afghanistan. The city is closed to non-residents, who in any case are abandoning it. Liza is one of them. An adolescent in search of her
identity, she has gone with her mother to a village she has never been to, but where her mother is very well known. And for good reason: the village bears her name. The mansion, an imposing but dilapidated Italianate building,
belonged to her ancestors, Russian princes close to the tsar. As for Liza, she bears the name of her father: Klein. A father who lives in America and the mere mention of whom is all but forbidden. Liza understands only that she has
a German name, and that she is the descendant, on her father’s side, of Joseph Klein, the Russian translator of Goethe.

Here, suddenly, are too many identities, whose accumulating questions go unanswered. Jewish, aristocratic, Soviet, intellectual – her family is a tissue of contradictions. To crown it all, she is troubled by David, her mother’s friend,
whose house they are living in, and who as she quickly realizes is of Jewish origin, a pillager of memories in the ancestral mansion, an accomplice of the village folk, a disillusioned artist declared a “social parasite” by the
authorities, who collaborates with a film crew that finances its perfectly official films by trafficking in icons...

Medvedkova's novel ideally combines a number of themes and elements which are quite typical for any novel where action is set in Russia, but their mixture produces an unexpected effect. Its protagonist a 15-year-old anorexic girl, a wonder-kid passing throughout a difficult stage of growing up and maturing, confronting the outside world and - especially - her authoritarian mother who herself has many skeletons in her closet.

The novel features the "ordinary family of Soviet intellectuals". Its narrative gains momentum gradually, and that subtly reflects the state of the soul and consciousness of the main character, its internal development: from slow and sleepy, to feverishly sharp, dizzy fast. Up to the very end of the book, Lisa (and the reader) doesn't see the full picture.

The novel is beautifully written, very dynamic and elegant. It's a concentrate of all Russian and Soviet just in the form that Western readership is interested to get. Aristocratic roots of Liza's family, dissidents, Soviet cultural elite, intelligentsia, etc. - in fact, the book provides a descriptive account of formation, way of thinking and self-perception of the modern Russian intellectuals, all these people who now got to play an important role in world science, culture,
politics, and economy.

The book is originally written in French and has around 220 pages.

A PERSON NOT TO BE TRUSTED, a novel by Vladislav Otroshenko (2010)

Rights sold: Italy – Voland, USA – The Literary Review (magazine rights), Russia – Limbus-press, Free Fly, CoLibri

Time and space, illusion and dream, world history and death are the main themes of Otroshenko's A Person Not to Be Trusted, where fantasy intertwines with reality, hoaxes and historical facts look just the same.

Literary critics sometime call Vladislav Otroshenko 'mystical realist' and 'postmodern writer', comparing his works to these of J.L.Borges, Italo Calvino, Gaite Gazdanova, and Milorad Pavić. At the same time, after Otrosheko's Person Not To Be Trusted was published in Italy (Voland, 1997), local journalists have dubbed the story 'philosophical mystery novel'.

Vladislav Otroshenko combined a rich, almost Gogolian prose style with Borgesian fantasy in his long-awaited volume of various genres of prose, entitled Persona vne dostovernosti (A Person Not to Be Trusted). (Thomas Epstein, The Literary Review)