We are happy to have shared this year with you! A year marked by multiple crises - the war in Ukraine, the aftermath of the pandemic, political instability.
In these unpredictable circumstances we were successful in keeping our connections with our colleagues from Ukrainian cultural organizations, with authors and translators. We welcomed three writers, who had been forced to leave their home countries due to political oppression, in the residency program of the Sofia Literature and Translation House - Maria Lappo and Hanna Komar from Belarus and Ekaterina Derisheva from Ukraine.
In 2022 a total of 15 authors, translators and editors from 12 countries worked on original pieces or on translations from Bulgarian works by Georgi Bardarov, Deyan Enev, Dilyan Benev, Ivan Hristor, Petar Chuhov, Teordora Dimova. For the first time we had writers from India, Kosovo and Belarus in our program.
We are grateful that we are back to organizing events with a live audience in the garden and library of the House, and that we continued our regular event program.
We were guests at some very pleasant Sofia spots like the FOX book cafe, Schroedinger Bar and MAZE Club; we presented events at the stages of Project Art Summer in Veliko Tarnovo and Alma Alter Hall in Sofia University; we were part of the Literary Meetings’ program in Toplotsentrala, and of the Sofia International Literary Festival in the National Palace of Culture.
The first session of the International Academy for Literary Management and Translation Promotion, which is part of our international project the Balkan Translations Collider, took place in Struga, North Macedonia this spring. It brought together literary managers from the Balkans and EU countries, who are committed to their role in international literary communication. The Academy provided tools, ideas and professional contacts for accelerating lesser translated literatures in today’s highly competitive world.
After three successful years and 87 participants to date, the Autumn Studio for Literary Translation had its fourth edition with various formats, multilingual hives on translation and editing, lectures, discussion panels and talks tackling translation conundrums.
We gathered literary translators from Bulgarian for the first time in Sofia for the Balkan Studio for Literary Translation ViceVersa, which was part of the Translation in Motion project.
As is now tradition, the Transparent Translator event, in which literary translators work on the same text simultaneously and share different approaches and decisions in front of a live audience, was also a component of the studio. This year we experimented with the Bulgarian-Macedonian language combination, which led some voices calling us “codifiers of Macedonian” and “national tractors”.
After a two-year gap due to Covid, we traveled once again to the Frankfurt Book Fair, where we met with colleagues and partners, and where we hatched new ideas.
In 2022 we continued to chair the European network of translation centers RECIT, which this year attracted new member organizations from the Czech Republic and Croatia. As part of the network’s project Translation in Motion, the Sofia Literature and Translation House hosted residents from Albania, France, Latvia, North Macedonia, Serbia, Sweden and the UK.
* * *
For ourselves, we wish the new year brings more calm and time for beach holidays!
May it bring the same to all of you, who were with us in the past year! Thank you to our audience, our residents, our educators and workshop leaders, to our like-minded community and to our backers from the National Culture Fund, Sofia Municipality, the Creative Europe Programme of the EU, the Polish Institute in Sofia, the Cervantes Institute, Traduki, S Fischer Foundation, and to all who participate and contribute to our joint work.
