With translators about the disappearing letter „e”

23.10.2023

On October 18, second-year philology students, specializing in translation, took part in a meeting with translators of literature, held as part of LiterAction at the Themerson Cultural Center in Płock.

It was a conversation with René Koelblen and Stanislaw Waszak, translators of Georges Perec’s „Disappearances.” It is a French novel – a lipogram containing more than 300 pages, on which the letter „e” does not appear once. The novel premiered in 1969 and was considered untranslatable into Polish until now. René Koelblen and Stanislaw Waszak spoke passionately about their work on the translation, about tracking down allusions and references encoded in the novel by the author, about the research they conducted and the solutions they applied.

In the Polish „Disappearances”, for example, there are poems familiar to the Polish reader, Jan Kochanowski’s trench or Adam Mickiewicz’s „Invocation” without the letter „e” („Lithuania! My homeland! You are like a health specimen”). For the students it was a unique opportunity to learn about the workshop of the translator, whose role is nowadays undergoing a transformation, as they are becoming spokesmen promoting both authors and their books

Heartfelt thanks on the occasion of International Translation Day!