Events

July 2017

SAND Presents
Workshops with Kathleen Heil
on Translation, Movement, and Phrasing

 

Our Issue 13 contributor Kathleen Heil is a writer, translator, and dancer whose many skills eagerly intersect. We are thrilled to be presenting two weekend workshops with her this July: one on literary translation into English and another examining phrasing in both movement and writing.

Style & Translation Master Class

This two-day master class is open to literary translators at all stages of their careers, translating from any language into English, as well as those with writing or translation experience curious to know more about the art and craft of literary translation. In this master class we will explore what makes literary translation distinct from other writing practices and investigate ways to hone the components of style that make for effective literary translations including tone, rhythm, and syntax.

The weekend will culminate with an open reading in which participants can present either a short text of their own translation or a favorite excerpt in translation. Additionally, for those wishing to have a more in-depth look at their writing, there will be four slots available for manuscript consultation with Kathleen (of work in translation or one’s own fiction, nonfiction, or poetry).

When
Master class: 8 and 9 July, 3–6pm
Manuscript consultations: 8 July, 6–8pm
Open reading by workshop participants: 9 July at 8pm

Where
Location in Berlin TBA

Cost
90 euros; 130 euros with Rhythm & Phrasing workshop and payment before 1 July

Info and registration*: [email protected]
Manuscript consultation*: 50 euros for a full manuscript review in any genre with written comments and a 30-minute session to discuss the text (3–5 poems or one prose manuscript, 10 pages or less)

*space is limited; early registration encouraged

Rhythm & Phrasing: A Workshop on Composing in Movement and Text

This workshop is open to anyone wishing to compose with greater efficacy by refining phrasing in movement and written texts. By investigating rhythmic patterns in the body and on the page, we will explore how to build these structures into meaningful phrases, in order to compose with greater freedom, precision, and presence. Dance experience is not required to take part, but rather an interest in/experience with writing, movement, and/or performance.

When: 22 and 23 July 2017, 3–6 pm
Where: K77 studios, Kastanienallee 77 Berlin
Cost: 60 euros; 130 euros with Style & Translation workshop and payment before 1 July
Info and registration: [email protected]

space is limited; early registration encouraged

About Kathleen

Kathleen Heil is a writer, translator, and dancer. Her translations, poems, stories, and essays appear in the New Yorker, Two Lines, Penguin Random House, Fence, and many other publications. She holds a Master’s degree in Creación Literaria from the Escuela Contemporánea de Humanidades in Madrid as well as an MFA in Creative Writing & Translation from the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville, where she also taught literary translation, creative writing, and dance. A former member of Dance Arizona Repertory Theater and Rumblepeg Dance Theater, Heil has worked with various artists in the U.S. and Europe and performed her own choreography in New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Madrid, and elsewhere. A 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Literary Translation Fellow, she lives and works in Berlin. More at kathleenheil.net.

Workshops on Translation, Movement, and Writing Read More »

8 June 2017

Stadtsprachen Magazin and SAND
Bring You Parataxe Presentation

What languages does Berlin write in? The PARATAXE event series showcases Berlin authors who write in languages other than German in discussions, lectures, and translations.

The June 2017 event presented Sonia Solarte (Colombia/Berlin) and our Issue 10 alum Ian Orti (Canada/Berlin) with texts translated into German especially for the occasion by Christiane Quandt and Joey Bahlsen. Stadtsprachen’s director Martin Jankowski also discussed SAND with Jake Schneider, our Editor in Chief.

Sonia Solarte was born in Cali, Colombia, where she worked as a teacher, psychotherapist, voice actress, and cultural appointee. She has lived in Berlin since 1988. From 1991 until 2013, she worked as coordinator of the S.U.S.I. Intercultural Women’s Center in Berlin. Since 1992, Sonia Solarte has been singing in the Orquesta Burundanga, which came to be known as the first all-women salsa band of Berlin. In 2009, she founded the “Trio Sol Arte.” Sonia Solarte has participated in various literature and poetry festivals. Her poems have been published in numerous national and international anthologies, literary magazines, and journals in several Latin American and European countries.

Ian Orti (featured in SAND Issue 10) was born in Canada to Ecuadorian and Irish parents. He is the author of the award-winning books The Olive and the Dawn, and L (and things come apart), as well as his most recent story collection Royal Mountain City Fugue. His short stories and poetry have been published in journals across North America and Europe and his first book was published in French with Les Editions Allusifs. Orti was featured in the Big Small documentary series for the Pop Montreal music festival by Australian director Tim Kelly and is a former columnist for McSweeneys in the US and Matrix Magazine in Canada. He has lived in Berlin since 2011, where he is now working on his next novel.

PARATAXE (supported by the Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa) and stadtsprachen magazin jointly introduce today’s multilingual authors and literary scenes of Berlin.

 

Parataxe with Sonia Solarte & Ian Orti – 8 June Read More »

14 June 2017

SAND Presents
Collective Love Story
at Love Story of Berlin

In cooperation with SAND, the new English bookstore Love Story of Berlin presented an evening on the universal theme of love in all its manifestations on Wednesday, 14 June at 8pm. Six Berlin-based English-language writers had written stories, novels, and essays depicting moments of love and heartbreak, casual dating, and coupledom, from the doldrums to cloud nine. In a collaborative workshop, the authors linked excerpts from their separate works into one collective love story, which they will present to you at our reading.

Jake Schneider, editor in chief of SAND, hosted the evening. 

Details

Time: 14 June, 8pm
Admission: free
Location: Love Story of Berlin, Kastanienallee 88, 10435 Berlin, Germany
Transportation: M1/Tram 12 Schwedter Straße, U2 Eberswalder Straße

Readers

Maree J. Hamilton is a staff writer for Autostraddle.com. Her work has also appeared in The Rumpus, Teen Vogue, Marie Claire, Kaltblut, and The Emerson Review. She hosts monthly storytelling events in Berlin, and writes a mean limerick, as well as some nice ones.

Kathleen Heil is a writer, translator, and dancer. She has published in The New Yorker, The Guardian, Fence, and elsewhere, and performed in New York, San Francisco, Madrid, and other cities. Find her this July in Berlin teaching workshops on literary translation and composition in movement & text. More at kathleenheil.net.

Scott Martingell has been working as a voiceover artist in Berlin since 2008. He wrote and performed in dance pieces in Copenhagen for eight years and, as MC Jabber, was lyricist and co-vocalist in the Danish trip-hop band Blue Foundation, whose tracks featured in Miami Vice and the Grammy-nominated, Billboard#1 album soundtrack for Twilight.

Kate McNaughton was born and raised in Paris by British parents, which left her culturally confused but usefully multilingual. She now lives in Berlin. Her debut novel HOW I LOSE YOU will be published by Doubleday (UK) and Les Escales (France) in 2018.

Ben Miller is a writer and researcher at work on new fiction and the transnational history of queer identity formation between Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany and postwar California. His fiction, essays, and criticism have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Slate, Jacobin, Pelican Bomb, Lambda Literary, and The Open Bar at Tin House. Benwritesthings.com

Ryan Ruby is a writer and translator from Los Angeles, California. His fiction and criticism have appeared in Conjunctions, The Baffler, Dissent, n+1, The Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere. He has translated Roger Caillois and Grégoire Bouillier from the French for Readux Books. His debut novel The Zero and the One was published in March 2017 by Twelve Books.

Collective Love Story Read More »

19 May 2017

Issue 15 Launch Party
at Badehaus Berlin

A Berlin spring means
brighter days, canal-side beers,

and fresh new writing from SAND! 

SAND Issue 15 takes us from a remote Arctic island to a land of eternal springtime, stopping off at all kinds of weird and wonderful places along the way. We launched it into the world on Friday, 19 May, at Badehaus Berlin.

DOORS

READINGS

DANCING

ADMISSION

LOCATION

8:30pm

9pm

Until the sun comes up

4 euros

Badehaus Berlin
Revaler Str. 99, 10245 Berlin
(in the RAW-Gelände – enter across from Simon-Dach-Str.)
S/U Wahrschauer Str., M10 Revaler Str.

Readers

Avital Gad-Cykman’s
flash collection Life In, Life Out was published by Matter Press. Her stories have been published in The Literary Review, Ambit, CALYX Journal, Glimmer Train, McSweeney’s, Prism International, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. They have also been featured in anthologies such as W.W. Norton’s, Sex for America, Politically Inspired Fiction, Stumbling and Raging, The Flash, and The Best of Gigantic. Her work won the Margaret Atwood Society Magazine Prize, was placed first in The Hawthorne Citation Short Story Contest, and was a finalist for Iowa Fiction Award for story collections. She lives in Brazil.

Ellen Joan Harris
is currently studying for her masters in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths College.
She lives and writes in London.

Zoë Hitzig
is an American graduate student at the University of Cambridge.
Her poetry has recently been published or is forthcoming in Lana Turner, the New Yorker, Boston Review, and the New Statesman among other journals.

Charlotte Wührer
is from the almost-north of England.
She has been living in Berlin for five years, where she is currently working as a freelance translator and studying for an MA in English studies. In 2016, she was short-listed for The Reader Berlin/EXBERLINER’s Summer Short Fiction Competition. She was also long-listed for Mslexia’s Children’s Novel Competition for Gingerbread Woman, a queer coming-of-age novel for young adults. Her work can be found in print in FU Review and Berlin Unspoken, and online at Potluck Mag and Leopardskin and Limes. Sometimes she writes for Daddy Mag.

Music

James Falco • TEEROC & WLFGNG (Spät Shop Boys) • Maurice JamesAnton

Photos

All photos below taken by Anjula Schaub and presented here with our gratitude.

Issue 15 Launch Party on 19 May Read More »

Bernardine Evaristo, Malika Booker, Irenosen Okojie, Sharon Dodua Otoo, Hari Kunzru, Nikesh Shukla, and Catherine Johnson are all British writers. That is, they are citizens of the United Kingdom, despite familial ties past or present to Nigeria, Germany and Ghana, Ireland and India, Guyana and Grenada. Their collective antecedents include Yoruba Saros, Kashmiri Pandits, Jamaicans, Welsh folk; their names, faces, and outlooks are palimpsests of global circumnavigation. If one chooses to define these categorically successful writers this way — by their alleged foreignness — perhaps it makes no difference to whom which ethnicity or parentage belongs. But if one resists the classification of nationality by ethnicity, these writers’ fiction, poetry, and nonfiction emerge as fundamental to the British canon, a literature as vivid and manifold and quintessentially British as the populace of the United Kingdom itself.

At the British Council Literature Seminar 2017, titled “Diverse Voices, New Directions,” these seven writers painted a beautiful portrait of globalist British literature, both as it is now and as still to come. Chaired by Evaristo, the seminar featured three days of workshops, discussions, and readings with each of the aforementioned authors and served as an exploration of writing while nonwhite in contemporary Britain.

To avoid politics in writing is a luxury, just as to avoid politics in life is a privilege of the wealthy and white. The seven featured writers at the seminar, along with countless others delineated by their skin colors, accents, or customs, have no choice but to confront that distinction in everyday life. And if writing is the magnification and/or subversion of that reality, then the work of these seven is an ideal imprint of a widening British narrative.

Take Evaristo, whose recent novel features a closeted gay septuagenarian Antiguan Londoner, or Okojie, whose recent debut novel ties seventies London to nineteenth-century Kingdom of Benin through heritage and artifact. Likewise, Booker, a poet, incorporates rhythms of Caribbean speech to echo culture and emotion through generations, while Kunzru writes darkly funny novels exploring authenticity and access to culture across ethnicity and class. Johnson writes historical young adult novels that place the multiplicity of seventeenth-century British life in contrast to the selective memory of costume-drama England. Adding yet another cultural layer to her biography,  Berliner-by-choice Dodua Otoo recently won the prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann Prize “Herr Göttrup setzt sich hin” (Herr Göttrup Takes a Seat). And tackling the subject head-on, Shukla’s recent collection The Good Immigrant compiles essays by 21 Black, Asian, and minority British writers facing down a nostalgic post-imperial culture.

Beyond highlighting this crop of excellent British writers as representatives of nonwhite publication the world over, the British Council Literature Seminar was a dive into the hows and why of writing itself. Good literature, no matter the writer, complicates, breaks boundaries between too-easy classification, unravels the defined, and wrestles with uniquely complex narratives. It rewrites preconceptions and redefines history one poem, novel, or essay at a time.

Also, read our exclusive interview with Irenosen Okojie from the Literature Seminar here.

The British Council Literature Seminar Read More »

November 2016

The “As If” of Poetry
Workshop and Exhibition

As part of the Stadtsprachen literature festival, which celebrated writers by Berliners in all languages besides German, SAND and The Reader co-presented a workshop and exhibition at Savvy Contemporary exploring poetry, sound, and the collective experience of creating meaning. 

Workshop: The “As If” of Poetry

Is the poem an artifact? Is technology a poetic medium?

This day-long workshop served as the platform for poets and all kinds of sound enthusiasts to come together and reason around the issues concerning the discursive and material intersections of poetry and technology.

As part of the Stadtsprachen Literaturfestival, participants of all backgrounds and levels of experience were invited to join a group of selected artists in creating and conceptualizing texts and sonic devices.

During the first part of the workshop, Donna Stonecipher helped participants to familiarize themselves with alternative translation techniques that use sound, memory, and one’s own relation to space as the tools to “translate” a poem and the potential for the translation of texts within a single language. Finally, all participants got to write their own homophonic poems and translations.

The second part of the workshop – led by the sound poets and performers of Rudolf Kollektiv – focused on taking these poems and translating them again into pure sound. To do this, participants learned to build a range of simple sonic devices; contact microphones, optical theremins, and amplifiers. These devices were used to intervene (and interfere were) the texts created.

In the process of doing so, the workshop asked: is sound the medium of what resides outside the world of “meaning”?

The material resulting from this day-long workshop was presented in the exhibition “sound and cerement//technologies of decay,” which took place on 4 November at SAVVY Contemporary.

Co-organized by Stadtsprachen Literaturfestival, SAND Journal, and The Reader Berlin.

Exhibition: Sound and Cerement

“In that in-between zone, when surfacing from sleep but not yet fully awake, images can get condensed into words that seem entirely made up of sounds or silences”
—Severo Sarduy, Firefly, 1991

Curator

Valentina Ramona de Jesús

Invited Artists

Marie-Pascale Hardy
Alan Mills
Jane Flett
Sarnath Banerjee
Göksu Kunak
Klaas von Karlos
Kenny Fries
Martin Gubbins
John Peck
MoreBlackThenGod

Opening Schedule

8pm – Reading words out loud: John Peck
8:30pm – Audiovisual performance by Klaas von Karlos
10:00pm – The sounds of poetry by Martin Gubbins
12:00am – Sonic Intervention by MoreBlackthenGod

A project by SAND Journal and The Reader Berlin in partnership with Africavenir and SAVVY Contemporary

More details and photographs on the Stadtsprachen website.

The “As If” of Poetry Read More »

April 2013

Found in Translation Competition and Workshop

SAND Journal’s Found in Translation Workshop for emerging literary translators up to age 30 took place from 19 to 21 April 2013 in Berlin. It featured guest speakers, hands-on workshop sessions, dynamic discussions, and, of course, brunch. SAND also held a translation competition whose two winners, Allison M. Charette and Julia Sanches, were invited to participate in the workshop and featured in SAND Issue 7.

Found in Translation Competition

Allison M. Charette and Julia Sanches were our two winners for the SAND Found in Translation Competition, featured in SAND Issue 7.

Judge Katy Derbyshire chose Allison M. Charette’s story “Big” for its fully-formed, naturally fluent feel and well-rendered dialogue. The story is a novel excerpt from Grosse by Isabelle Rivoal. Allison is a translator and writer whose book The Last Love of George Sand was released in February 2013. In the musical world, her English translation of Hector Berlioz’s L’enfance du Christ was used as supertitles in the New York Choral Society’s performance at Carnegie Hall. She has lived in various regions of France, where she taught schoolchildren and translated Sève, a local author’s poetry collection. In 2013, Allison was residing in western New York with her husband.

Catherine Hales was impressed by Julia Sanches’ translations of Ana Martins Marques’ poetry from A vida submarina (The Subaquatic Life) and Da arte das armadilhas (On the Art of Traps). She especially liked the sense of quietness at the heart of the poems, their poise and perfect pitch in the language. Julia is Brazilian by birth but has lived in New York, Mexico City, Lausanne, Edinburgh and Barcelona. She obtained her undergraduate degree in Philosophy and English Literature from the University of Edinburgh and a Masters in Comparative Literature and Literary Translation from Universitat Pompeu Fabra. She was runner-up in MPT’s poetry in translation competition and has translated fiction from Spanish (in Suelta) and into Spanish (in Asymptote), as well as publishing a short story in Vol. 1 Brooklyn. In 2013, she was working as a freelance translator, private teacher of English and Portuguese, and as a reader for Random House Mondadori, while also interning for Asymptote and Electric Literature.

Workshop

Afternoon Poetry/Prose Workshop Session

Agora Collective, 19 April 2013, 4:00pm – 7:00pm

Workshop leaders Catherine Hales and Katy Derbyshire conducted dynamic sessions that explored spontaneous creation and the art of translation. Both groups were capped at 10 participants in order to facilitate an intimate and lively discussion.

“The element of spontaneous creation in translation is where you take a high dive off the cliff of the original and make a new original poem out of it,” according to Catherine Hales, the weekend’s poetry workshop leader. In this workshop, participants took a close look at the specific elements of poetry translation – how to deal with line breaks, scansion, meter, and meaning in an art form that’s so closely tied to the intricacies of the language in which it was written.

Catherine Hales is a poet and translator whose translations of contemporary German poetry have been published in several print and online magazines in the UK, US, and Europe. Her translations of Norbert Hummelt’s poems were published in Berlin Fresco by Shearsman Books in 2010.

Katy Derbyshire will be leading a group of prose writers in discovering how good translations work. The prose workshop will examine translations from different languages in order to probe ideas such as how invisible a translation should be and to shape a method for approaching a piece. Participants will also have the chance to workshop and critique each other’s work in an animated group discussion setting.

Katy Derbyshire grew up in London and studied German literature before moving to Berlin in 1996. She has translated Clemens Meyer, Inka Parei, Dorothee Elmiger, Simon Urban, Helene Hegemann, and other German writers.

Morning Session: The Who, the What, and the Why

Agora Collective, 20 April 2013, 9:30am – 12:00 pm

Both workshop groups came together on Saturday morning for a workshop session with a special guest speaker. In this session, we looked at the foundations of translation, its history, its evolution, and the reasons we continue to do it.

 

Afternoon Panel: In the Industry

Agora Collective, 20 April 2013, 1:30pm – 3:00 pm

John E. Woods, Martin Chalmers, and Lucy Renner-Jones had a panel discussion, moderated by Katy Derbyshire, on working as a professional in the translation industry. They looked at language and translation from various aspects: cultural, socio-political, historical, and practical, as well as talking about what challenges a translator faces both with the work and in the workforce.

John E. Woods is a translator who specializes in translating German literature and whose portfolio includes much of the fictional prose of Arno Schmidt and contemporary authors such as Ingo Schulze and Christoph Ransmayr. He has translated all of the major novels of Thomas Mann as well as works by many other writers.

Martin Chalmers’s book translations include work by Herta Mueller, Erich Fried, Hubert Fichte, and Alexander Kluge as well as The Diaries of Victor Klemperer. In 2013, he had recently had translations of Hans Magnus Enzensberger published under the titles The Silences of Hammerstein and (with Esther Kinsky) A History of Clouds.

Lucy Renner-Jones has worked as a freelance German to English translator since 2008 and specializes in literary texts and photography books. She works for Transfiction, a collective of native-speaker translators who specialize in theater and literary texts.

 

Afternoon Session: Translation in Play

Agora Collective, 20 April 2013, 3:30pm – 5:00 pm

Translation isn’t static. Yet so often, we approach it from a rigid, structured point of view. Workshop leader Donna Stonecipher presented translation in play, a hands-on, interactive session that looked at translation from a new angle, as the group delved into topics such as homophonic translation and translation within languages.

Donna Stonecipher is the author of three books of poetry: The Reservoir, Souvenir de Constantinople, and The Cosmopolitan. Her poems have been published widely and have been translated into French, German, Spanish, and Czech. She also translates from French and German, and her translation of Swiss author Ludwig Hohl’s novella Ascent was published in 2012.

 

The Future of Translation. // The Future of Translation?

Dialogue Books, 20 April 2013, 7:30pm – 11:00 pm

What better way to talk about the future of translation than with the future of translation? After a reading from two of our participants (who were selected during the workshop), we opened up the floor to discussion. We talked about how, where, and by whom works are being translated and why, and what, if anything, is holding translation back. And of course, we talked about where translation is headed.

This was an open-invitation event at Dialogue Books.

 

Brunch Reading

Agora Collective, 21 April 2013, 11:00am – 3:00pm

Hand-crafted breakfast cocktails, hot coffee, gooey-fresh pastries, buttery English muffins, and hard-boiled eggs to  crack with a silver spoon? Clearly, this was a brunch send-off SAND-style. We celebrated the  end of the workshop  weekend with a late-morning  brunch and reading by each of our  participants. Workshop groups presented what they’d worked on over the weekend as well as some  of their own translations.

SAND Found in Translation was proudly funded by the EU’s Youth in Action Programme.

Found in Translation Read More »

The very first issue of SAND was released at three different launch events over a three-week period:

Premiere Release

Wednesday, 5 May 2010 at 7:30pm

at ICI Berlin Institute of Inquiry

 

Hosted by Michael Haeflinger, with readings and performances by Richard Toovey (poetry); Lady Gaby (spoken word); Giovanni Frazzetto (short story); MC Jabber & Joe Czarnecki (spoken word & music combination)

Videos and photos available on the ICI website

SAND-themed FUEL Night

Sunday, 9 May 2010 at 9:00pm

at Schokoladen

 

Hosted by Lady Gabby

 

BeatStreet SAND Launch Party

Thursday, 27 Mat 2010 at 8:30pm (3 euros admission)

at Joe’s Bar on Schönhauser Allee

Readings from contributors Robert Grant, Alistair Noon, Linden Horvath and mr oCean and a musical performance by Ryan T. Jacobs.

SAND 1 Launch Events Read More »