Curator—Tania Rodionova
“Untranslatability is a blessing,” I once heard at a lecture of a Polish poetry translator.
“We translate because literature is untranslatable,”
he continued his statement.
Indeed, many things in our lives come out of impossibility. Out of the impossibility of reproducing a text in its entirety in another language, we start translating it, and out of the lack of opportunities for ourselves, we create new ones ourselves.
Thus in 2017, together with colleagues we founded TRANSLATORIUM—the first Ukrainian festival in Khmelnytskyi dedicated to translation. Being translators, in our hometown we lacked professional events and literary events in general. It seems that for all these eight years we have actually been saying that everything is translation. Every year, choosing a curatorial theme for the event program, we reflect on issues relevant to our society, bringing translation into a much broader dimension than just the textual one.
We think of translation as a way of perceiving the world, of cognition, but also as telling the world about ourselves, of exploring ourselves. Translation happens between us and around us all the time, but we do not always notice it. Due to translation, we have the opportunity to discover literature and cultures of other countries and peoples.
Translation is also about experimenting, as according to Walter Benjamin, original is life, and translation is afterlife. This means constant creation of something new, uncertainty in this creative process, fear of making the wrong choice. Although we all understand that there is no such thing as a right choice, there is only the plurality of options, many directions and paths. And it is translation that has been pushing us to new searches all these years. It is the driving force in our way of thinking.
At our festival, we talk a lot about interdisciplinary or intersemiotic translation. We translate poetry into ceramics, a novel into the language of classical music, or we work with visual art. After all, translation is a way of expanding the boundaries of the possible. That is why for us it remains a continuous process of movement, search and dialog that changes not only texts, but also ourselves. Because, indeed, everything is translation.
Within the program of Book Arsenal, we want to present the subject of translation in the most diverse way, as we do that every year at the festival in Khmelnytskyi. This includes professional talks about translation tricks and challenges, discussions with a wider range of writers, and art projects where translation is implicitly manifested but for us it is crucial.
TRANSLATORIUM is a non-governmental organization that works with translators and for the translators’ community, and also creates a platform for the intersection of different types of art. We organize residencies, art projects and the festival of the same name. The TRANSLATORIUM Literary and Translation Festival takes place in Khmelnytskyi every year in late September—early October and is timed to coincide with the International Translation Day. This year’s eighth edition is scheduled for September 19-21.