Quick access:

Go directly to content (Alt 1) Go directly to first-level navigation (Alt 2)

25.10.2022 - "52 Factory Lane" by Selim Özdoğan

Impressions of the evening

We had a lively conversation with our three guests. They did not hesitate to share personal thoughts about their work, but also to be open about how they felt when writing or translating. Many aspects of the migration experience of the 1970s came up, and it became clear how the character Gül, who came to Germany with her husband during that time, is drawn with great sensitivity, and how universal some experiences are. The audience was given a glimpse behind the scenes of translation work in a team with Katy and Ayça demonstrating how conversational and dynamic their work was.

Selim Özdogan (c) Goethe-Institut Irland

About the book

Heimstraße 52/52 Factory Lane is the second part of the Anatolian Blues trilogy.

‘You’ll live out your lives in a foreign country,’ Gül is warned. But the whole world is foreign when you’re far from your loved ones. The train ride to Germany ushers in the days of long-awaited letters, night-time telephone calls and blissful summers back home. The years of hard work will flow like water before her house in Turkey is built and she can return.
Until then, Gül will learn all kinds of longing: for her two daughters, for her father the blacksmith, for scents and colours and fruit. Yet imperceptibly, Factory Lane in this cold, incomprehensible country becomes a different kind of home.

Biographies

Selim Özdogan (c) Lucie Ella Selim Özdoğan was born in Germany in 1971 and has been publishing his prose since 1995. His work has won him numerous prizes and grants. Aside from writing, he is a very experienced yoga practitioner and an inveterate literary performer. He has published several short story collections and twelve novels, including The Blacksmith’s Daughter (2021) and 52 Factory Lane (2022) with V&Q Books.


Ayça Türkoğlu (c) Ayça Türkoğlu Ayça Türkoğlu is a writer and literary translator based in North London. Her translation interests include the literature of the Turkish diaspora in Germany and minority literatures in Turkey.







Katy Derbyshire (c) Anja Pietsch Katy Derbyshire translates contemporary German writers including Olga Grjasnowa, Clemens Meyer, and Heike Geissler. She teaches literary translation and also heads the V&Q Books imprint.



 

Endorsement

‘A modern-day fairy tale.’ NDR
‘Honest, urgent and emotional.’ Augsburger Allgemeine
‘An absolutely recommended novel that quietly stimulates the reader’s thoughts and portrays the hard work behind seeing a new country as home.’ migazin
‘A unique novel about the losses, sacrifices and determination of generations of migrant women; as important as it is moving.’ Preti Taneja

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.


Reading and discussion in the library with audience. (c) Privat

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

Porträt Judith Schalansky © 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.

Portät von Jackie Smith © 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.
 

Top