{"id":13552,"date":"2020-06-12T17:36:36","date_gmt":"2020-06-12T21:36:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/?p=13552"},"modified":"2020-06-12T17:36:39","modified_gmt":"2020-06-12T21:36:39","slug":"episode-374-philip-boehm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/episode-374-philip-boehm","title":{"rendered":"Episode 374 – Philip Boehm"},"content":{"rendered":"

Virtual Memories Show 374:
\nPhilip Boehm<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/traffic.libsyn.com\/secure\/virtualmemories\/Episode_374_-_Philip_Boehm.mp3<\/a><\/audio><\/div>

Podcast: Play in new window<\/a> | Download<\/a><\/p>

Subscribe: Spotify<\/a> | TuneIn<\/a> | RSS<\/a> | More<\/a><\/p>\n

“German language is like a big Lego set: there are component parts and you can take them apart and put them back together and they fit in neatly or at least with a lot of right angles. Polish and the other Slavic languages, have all these declensions, and the verbs have aspects, and Polish sounds like ‘autumnal rustling’.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>Translator and director Philip Boehm<\/a> joins the show fresh off winning his second Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize<\/a>. We talk about his prize-winning translation of Christine Wunnicke’s The Fox & Dr. Shimamura<\/a> (New Directions<\/a>), and the research and challenges that went into bringing the eerie historical novel to life in English, then get into his time in Poland in the ’80s, how it shaped his ideas on the role of the arts in society, and how he had to smuggle his work out of the country, the differences between translating for the page vs. the stage, his role as Artistic Director of Upstream Theater<\/a>, the time he pranked a publisher with a fake letter from Kafka to Milena, the pressure of translating canonical works and the joy of meeting & befriending authors he works on, the parallels between Iron Curtain countries in the ’80s & America today, how every theatrical staging is an act of translation, regardless of the source language, why German is like Lego while Polish is like autumnal rustling, how he’s dealing with Pandemic Life in Texas, and more! Give it a listen!<\/a> And go read The Fox & Dr. Shimamura<\/a>!<\/p>\n

“That sense of translation as a living body of work, and not relegated to some category or serving a particular work, that was more present in Poland when I was there in the 1980s.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n