Resumen de ‘Translators are the jazz musicians of the literary world’: translating Pamuk, literary translation networks and the changing face of the profession : Chantal Wright speaks to Maureen Freely
Chantal Wright, Maureen Freely
Maureen Freely – writer, literary translator, journalist, activist and feminist – teaches within the Warwick Writing Programme at the University of Warwick. She is the author of seven novels, most recently Sailing through Byzantium (Freely 2013a Freely, M. 2013a. Sailing Through Byzantium. Edinburgh: The Linen Press. [Google Scholar]), and the memoir Angry in Piraeus (Freely 2015 Freely, M. 2015. Angry in Piraeus. London: Sylph Editions. [Google Scholar]). Her translations from Turkish include five books by the Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar’s The Time Regulation Institute (2014 Tanpinar, A. H. 2014. The Time Regulation Institute. Translated by Alexander Dawe and Maureen Freely. London: Penguin. [Google Scholar]), which she co-translated with Alexander Dawe and which was awarded the Modern Language Association’s 2014 Lois Roth Award for a Translation of a Literary Work. Freely is a former chair of the UK’s Translators Association and the current president of English PEN. The following conversation took place at the University of Warwick over the course of the academic year 2015–16. Conversation ranged from Maureen Freely’s own experiences as a literary translator from Turkish, to the role of networks, institutions and individuals in improving the situation of literary translation in the UK over the last 10 years, and the translator’s ability to improvise like a jazz musician.
