Collective residencies / Mireia Calafell Translator's Seminar / Olot
GUILLERMO ÁLVAREZ SELLÁN
From Monday, 9 June 2025 to Friday, 13 June 2025
Bio
Born in Asturias, Guillermo has been driven by his passion for languages since his early childhood. Barcelona and Heidelberg marked the milestones of his linguistic biography, with Catalan and German playing a prominent role in his professional career. Over the years, he grew to be a passionate polyglot and an expert on minoritized languages of Europe. He works as a translator, university lecturer and PhD researcher (main research area "influence of linguistic ideologies on standardization processes") and tries to make linguistic diversity advocacy an integral part of his scope of activities within those professional fields. His current focus is on both his PhD thesis and several translation projects fostering the diffusion of minoritized languages.
Project
She will translate Mireia Calafell's poems into German.
After working on Mireia's poems for months, the opportunity to spend time with the poet herself, to have the great fortune and delight of hearing her recite in an intimate circle, to chat and exchange views on her work and to clarify specific translation questions related to particular poems, was a great help in resolving key points and went a long way towards promoting the German translation.
Furthermore, the privileged material, geographical and, above all, human conditions – from the workers at Faberllull to all the participants, coordinators and guests – meant the translators were able to learn and share so much, with this highly supportive environment promoting the generation of new contexts and work situations that sometimes hadn't even been foreseen. In other words, apart from the guided translation sessions established within the programme, chatting with other attendees often allowed us to find an unexpected solution, provide an idea that untied a knot or paved the way for future projects. It was an environment that truly inspired you to do more work and try new things.
The coexistence of languages and cultures, with a common passion for Catalan poetry in general and Mireia Calafell's in particular, made the event a resounding success in terms of resolving problems in translated poems and developing working ideas for ongoing projects. Above all, I would especially highlight it for its long-term virtue – the creation of a network, a fabric maintained over time, full of shared ideas and energy and which always (and I am a witness to this thanks to past, also highly positive, experiences at Faberllull) bears fruit.