Translation: Making a Whole Culture Intelligible? World Literature Weekend

Anthony Burgess insisted that ‘translation is not a matter of words only’. Umberto Eco, on the other hand, has said that ‘translation is the art of failure’. So, what do translators hope to achieve? This lively panel discussion in the Paul Hamlyn Library at the British Museum involved past winning translators of the IFFP, Anthea Bell, Daniel Hahn, Anne McLean and Frank Wynne, and was chaired by the Arts Council’s Kate Griffin.Four past winners of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize gathered in the Paul Hamlyn Library to discuss the difficulties of selling translated literature, the cultural resources available to translators, working on dead authors, translating dialect, and a host of other tricky areas involved in literary translation. The panel was chaired by the Arts Council's Kate Griffin.