Bio

Claudia Kalász was born in 1953 in Mönchengladbach (Germany). She did her Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt with a dissertation about the relationship between poetry and reflexions on language in Hölderlin. From 1983 to 1988 she taught German language and literature at the University of Rome, La Sapienza. Since 1988 she lives in Barcelona. From 1988 to 2019, she worked for the Goethe-Institut Barcelona. Until 1998 she also taught German at the Department of Translation of the UAB. In 2006 she started translating Catalan literature. She translated Catalan poetry for several Institutions (IRL, AELC, lyrikline). She also edited and translated a collection of tales by Víctor Català and Narcís Oller. She is involved in some projects of the Catalan conceptual artist Francesc Abad, especially those dealing with Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch.

Project

During my stay at Faber Olot as a participant of the workshop "Vice Versa" on Catalan-German Translation, I want to discuss some problems I encountered during my translation of the novel "Crist de 200.000 braços" by Agustí Bartra (based on the author's experience in the French Concentration Camps for Spanish republican refugees). There are doubts concerning the choice of words, syntactic changes due to the characteristics of German language, some licenses due to the poetic character of the language or the difficulty to recreate unusual expressions. Of course, I am also eager to learn about the experience of the fellow translators.