Impressions of the evenings
The two UCD students Alex and Iga led our audience through the evening with thought-provoking questions, which Schalansky and Smith had great fun discussing in depth.The audience was given a comprehensive insight into the process of creating and translating the book; for example, we learned about the challenge of finding a fitting English translation for the title "Verzeichnis einiger Verluste". Smith and Schalansky were not meeting for the first time - they previously worked together at a translators' workshop on Schalansky's works, and they shared a wonderful energy during their discussion. It was a successful and stimulating evening, during which the guests were able to have a relaxed personal conversation with our speakers over a glass of wine afterwards.
About the book
Contrary to popular belief, conservation is not the arresting of change but its careful management; the conservator’s task is to guide artworks through time. On a large enough timescale, even the most precious charges are doomed, often thanks to the well-meaning but ultimately ill-conceived interventions of those who most wish them to survive.
The subjects of Judith Schalansky’s new book, "An Inventory of Losses", have already made their great passage out of this world. Extinct species, destroyed books, and buildings dismantled brick by brick are all featured in "An Inventory of Losses", translated from the German by Jackie Smith. The book’s theme seems a natural development from Schalansky’s previous authorial interests. Her Atlas of Remote Islands (2009) is a striking collection of vignettes about the far-flung corners of the globe where, hidden from view, acts of cruelty and destruction take place with impunity: abuse, murders, the decimation of wildlife populations, and, above all, the loss of life and culture that inevitably follow the arrival of colonizers’ ships.
An Inventory of Losses - Harvarv Review
Biographies
© René Fietzek Judith Schalansky, born 1980 in Greifswald, studied Art History and Communication Design. Her Works, including internatioal best selling novel "Atlas of remote islands", the Bildungsroman "Der Hals der Giraffe" and "An Inventory of Losses" have been translated into more than 25 languages and were awarded numerous times. She is Editor of the "Naturkunden" and of the library "Wildes Wissen" (both published by Matthes & Seitz Berlin) and lives in Berlin.© privat Jackie Smith studied Modern Languages (German and French) at the University of Cambridge. After graduating she worked as a commercial translator, including several years at a German bank, before venturing into book translation. She has translated fiction and non-fiction, and in 2017 was the winner of the Austrian Cultural Forum London Translation Prize. Her translation of Judith Schalansky’s “An Inventory of Losses”, which was her first full-length literary translation, won the Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize 2021, the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, and the TA First Translation Prize, and was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2021 and the National Book Award for Translated Literature. She currently works as a translator at the German Embassy in London.