Thinking Together Memory and Translation: Current Perspectives in Literary Studies
International Workshop of the Research Project Remembering and Translating Violent Pasts (FWF)
Organisers: Claudia Jünke | Maja Klostermann
University of Innsbruck | 10 October 2025 | Ágnes-Heller-Haus (04K100/04M100)

Programme

09:00-09:30: Opening Addresses by Prof. Dr. Sabine Schrader (Head of the Institute of Romance Studies) and Dr. Elisabeth De Felip-Jaud (Dean of Studies of the Faculty of Language, Literature and Culture), Introduction by Prof. Dr. Claudia Jünke

Panel 1 – Chair: Prof. Dr. Claudia Jünke (Univ. Innsbruck)

09:30-10:15: Maja Klostermann, M.Ed. (Univ. Innsbruck): Linking Trauma, Language, and the Body. Translating the Aftermath of the Algerian War of Independence in Maïssa Bey’s Entendez-vous dans les montagnes… (2002) and Its German Translation from a Multidisciplinary Perspective

10:15-11:00: Prof. (em.) Dr. Désirée Schyns (Univ. Gent): The Memoir of a General Who Was a Torture Specialist: The Reception of the English Translation of Général Aussaresses’s Services Spéciaux, Algérie 1955-1957 (2001), The Battle of the Casbah: Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism in Algeria 1955-1957 (2002)

11:00-11:30: Coffee Break

Panel 2 – Chair: Prof. Dr. Juliane Prade-Weiss (LMU München)

11:30-12:15: Prof. Dr. Alicia Castillo Villanueva (Dublin City Univ.): Between Silence and Voice: The Translator as Guardian of Memory

12:15-13:00: Andrea Linder, M.A. (Univ. Innsbruck): “We didn’t start the fire…!” Translated Memories in Nona Fernández’s La dimensión desconocida (2016) and its German version Twilight Zone (2024)

13:00-14:30: Lunch Break

Panel 3 – Chair: Prof. Dr. Claudia Jünke (Univ. Innsbruck)

14:30-15:15: Prof. Dr. Cornelia Ruhe (Univ. Mannheim): Close to the Bone. Taina Tervonen’s Literary Translation of Traumatic Violence

15:15-16:00: Prof. Dr. Arvi Sepp (Vrije Univ. Brussel): „Gebrochene Sprache“: Post-Holocaust Reflections on the Untranslatability of the German Language in German-Jewish Philosophy and Literature

16:00-16:30 h Coffee Break

Panel 4 – Chair: Prof. Dr. Dominik Markl (Univ. Innsbruck)

16:30-17:15: Dr. Ulla Ratheiser/Prof. Dr. Christoph Singer (Univ. Innsbruck): Local(ising) Jewish Pasts from a Transcultural Perspective: Memories of the Schindler and Justman Families

17:15-18:00: Prof. Dr. Geir Uvsløkk (Univ. Oslo): Speaking with Silences. Anna Langfus in Translation

18:00: Concluding Remarks

In recent years, the connections between collective memory on the one hand and interlingual/cultural translation on the other hand have increasingly attracted the attention of scholars from various academic disciplines, including literary studies. The publication of the Routledge Handbook of Translation and Memory (ed. Sharon Deane-Cox/Anneleen Spiessens 2022) exemplifies the growing recognition of translation and memory as a distinct field of inquiry. Other recent works similarly explore the role of translation in the transfer and circulation of memory narratives across linguistic, cultural, societal and national borders (e.g. Brownlie 2016; Boase-Beier et al. 2017; Gutiérrez Pintado/Castillo Villanueva 2018; Radstone/Wilson 2021; Jünke/Schyns 2023). Many of these studies are inspired by Bella Brodzki’s influential Can These Bones Live? Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory (2007), in which the author draws on Walter Benjamin’s reflections on the ‘task of the translator’ to relate translation to the concept of survival. Brodzki views translation as a critical, dynamic process that enables a source text’s persistence or renaissance beyond its own limitations. As she writes: “Translation is the mode through which what is dead, disappeared, forgotten, buried, or suppressed overcomes its determined fate by being borne (and thus born anew) to other contexts across time and space” (6).

The workshop, part of the research project Remembering and Translating Violent Pasts (funded by the FWF), aims to bring together international scholars in literary studies working at the intersection of memory and translation. The goal is to discuss current research in this field and exchange perspectives on the interactions between these two concepts and phenomena. In doing so, we aim to gain a deeper understanding of the translational aspects of memory dynamics and how we might describe them.

References
Boase-Beier, Jean/Peter Davies/Andrea Hammel/Marion Winters (ed.), 2017: Translating Holocaust Lives, London: Bloomsbury.
Brodzki, Bella, 2007: Can these bones live? Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory, Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press.
Brownlie, Siobhan, 2016: Mapping Memory in Translation, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
Deane-Cox, Sharon/Anneleen Spiessens (ed.), 2022: The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Memory, London et al.: Routledge.
Gutiérrez Pintado, Lucía/Alicia Castillo Villanueva (ed.), 2018: New Approaches to Translation, Conflict and Memory: Narratives of the Spanish Civil War and the Dictatorship, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Jünke, Claudia/Désirée Schyns (ed.), 2023: Translating Memories of Violent Pasts. Memory Studies and Translation Studies in Dialogue, London: Routledge.
Radstone, Susannah/Rita Wilson (ed.), 2021: Translating Worlds. Migration, Memory, and Translation, London et al.: Routledge.