Collective residencies / Mireia Calafell Translator's Seminar / Olot
NATHALIE BITTOUN-DEBRUYNE
From Monday, 9 June 2025 to Friday, 13 June 2025
Bio
Nathalie Bittoun-Debruyne was born in Paris in 1957 but has been claiming to be "normalised" for years. She dreams and denies in French, but can do so equally in Catalan. She earned a PhD in French philology with a thesis covering Marivaux's reception in Spanish theatre. Before retiring, she was a professor at the Institut del Teatre in Barcelona and then a French professor at the Open University of Catalonia.
A specialist in comparative literature, she has translated numerous Catalan poets into French, from an anthology ("Catalan Poets", Belgium) to Víctor Sunyol, Vicenç Altaió, Gemma Gorga, J. M. Sala-Valldaura, Anna Montero, Mireia Calafell and more. She has also brought René Char, Jules Verne and Sartre closer to Catalan.
In addition to these achievements, of note is her enthusiasm for the Catalan and French languages and literatures ... and the fact that she has not retired from her passion for translation.
Project
She will translate Mireia Calafell's poems into French.
Days of Translation and Literature
It's not easy to summarise the full experience we had in Olot thanks to the Faberllull initiative of assembling nine translators of Mireia Calafell's poetry to work together for a week. In a hugely conducive environment, surrounded by greenery and calm, we engaged in activities as diverse as they were rewarding.
Under the coordination of Francesco Ardolino, and with Mireia Calafell herself there, we approached her poetry in two very different but complementary fashions. Firstly, by translating into Catalan poems by authors whose writing, in our opinion, had points in common: we walked into the heart of a forest to read the translations together and, with Mireia, present and comment on these relationships. In other sessions, we translated several of her poems into our native tongues and shared the results after each one, swapping insights around the difficulties and obstacles in the different languages, as well as solutions and alternatives.
Working with translators in the languages closest to mine (French), such as Spanish, Galician and Italian, contrasted with the German and English - and even more so with Hungarian, Polish and Basque! It was thrilling to learn how certain languages worked, as well as the importance of different cultural contexts. We reflected out loud, asked others about the problems they had with certain aspects or how they had solved things had left us stumped: it was sometimes surprising to see that, in French, for example, I could find a similar solution to my Hungarian counterpart...
I would also like to highlight the interesting conversations and sessions with Izaskun Arretxe and Sebastià Portell, as well as the sterling organisation by Faberllull, represented especially by Misia Sert, who combined efficiency and friendliness with ease. Finally, I would like to thank Faberllull for giving me the opportunity to meet such diverse and interesting people as Guillermo, Helena, Unai, Ilaria, Dora, Marta, Itxaro and Rebecca, and to have experienced such beautiful and intense days around translation and literature.