Ljubljana's LitTransformer 2023

Keira Brown
Communications Executive
Edinburgh City of Literature Trust

22 May 2023

Apply Now for a Translation Workshop in Ljubljana

Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, was a World Book Capital in 2010. After being designated a UNESCO City of Literature in 2015, it joined our growing world-wide network of cities and committed to actively promote literature, reading culture, and engage in activities that would strengthen the collaboration in the field of writing and publishing.

Edinburgh is a UNESCO City of Literature, and through our work to develop an international network of Cities of Literature, we bring international opportunities for those working in literature, connected to Edinburgh. If you have that connection and work in translation, apply now to spend an invigorating week in Ljubljana this summer! Ljubljana City of Literature are offering an international translation workshop that fosters collaboration among translators from various UNESCO Cities of Literature, stressing the importance of literary translation and its power to nurture cross-culture dialogue.

LitTransformer is a project that was started by Lviv City of Literature and is being continued under the guidance of Ljubljana City of Literature.

When: July 2–10, 2023

Where: Ljubljana, Slovenia

Mentors: Aron Aji, the Director of Center for Translation and Global Literacy, and Translation Programs at the University of Iowa, and Matthias Göritz, professor of Practice of Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis.

Topic: Passages of Survival Cities are living organisms, constantly reshaped by all forms of violence. However, cities are also creative transformation zones, capable of spurning creative anarchies with regenerative potential. Now, in times of world crises, and particularly one of the biggest wars since the Second World War in the center of Europe – the war in Ukraine – cities will once again speak and hear each other. LitTransformer aims to reflect on the recuperative possibilities of literature and foster translation as cross-cultural dialogue, thus emphasising the opportunities for empathy.

With this in mind, the workshop sets out to create an engaging cross-cultural environment where participants from represented Cities of Literature are asked to interact creatively, by translating poetry.

Deadline: 4 June 2023

Participants will work in pairs across three languages: their two native languages as well as English, the bridge between them. Each participant will be both a guide into their own urban imaginary (in their native language) and a novice traveller into a foreign one (in their partner’s language). Interrogating their own subjectivities, participating translators will be moving between familiarity and estrangement, experiencing both languages vividly and reflectively.

If you wish to apply for the workshop, submit your application here by 4 June 2023.