7 April 2023

New Europe College is delighted to announce the grantees of the 2022/ 2023 TANDEM “Author with Translator – Translator with Author” fellowships supported by S. Fischer Stiftung, Berlin, who will be soon opening this new literary translation residences program at the Institute.

The Tandem teams are (from top, left-right):

1) Susanna HARUTYUNYAN (Author) and Ani SARUKHANYAN (Translator)
Translating Susanna Harutyunyan, Ագռավները Նոյից առաջ/ Ravens Before Noah/ Agravnerə  Noyits araj from Armenian into Turkish

Abstract:

Ravens Before Noah is a novel first published in 2015 and re-published in 2019. Winner of Presidential Prize for Literature in Armenia.

This novel is set in the Armenian mountains sometime in 1915-1960. An old man and a new born baby boy escape from the Hamidian massacres in Turkey in 1894 and hide themselves in the ruins of a demolished and abandoned village. The village soon becomes a shelter for many others, who flee from problems with the law, their families, or their past lives. The villagers survive in this secret shelter, cut off from the rest of the world, by selling or bartering their agricultural products in the villages beneath the mountain. Years pass by, and the child saved by the old man grows into a young man, Harout. He falls for a beautiful girl who arrived in the village after being tortured by Turkish soldiers. She is pregnant and the old women of the village wants to kill the twin baby girls as soon as they are born, to wash away the shame…

Book Review: Harutyunyan’s Ravens before Noah: Towards an Armenian Baroque by Christopher Atamian in The Armenian Mirror Spectator (2021)

Short bios:

Susanna Harutyunyan is a fiction writer. She is one of the most acclaimed women writers in Armenia with a bibliography of 8 published books and numerous publications in short story anthologies. In 2016 she got Armenia’s highest honor, The Presidential Prize for Literature, for her newly published novel Ravens Before Noah. Susanna Harutyunyan’s works have been translated and published in English, French, German, Serbian, Arabic and other languages.

Ani Sarukhanyan is a well-known Turkish-Armenian translator and interpreter having an experience in almost all areas of translation as a freelancer. As a literary translator she attended to the HAH literary translators’ workshop in Dilijan/ Armenia (2017), primarily focused on developing the skills of literary translators and generating the translation of novel-in-stories HAH (Birgul Oguz) into Eastern Armenian. Sarukhanyan has been teaching Armenian and Turkish as a foreign language for many years and lecturing at the Ankara University, Department of Armenian Language and Culture.

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2) Maria RYBAKOVA (Author) and Marina VRACIU (Translator)                                                                      
Translating Maria Rybakova, Cetverovecinost/ Quaternity: Four Novellas from the Carpathians/ Cuaternitate. Patru nuvele din Carpați from English/Russian into Romanian

Abstract:

A collection of four novellas published in September 2021. Four thematically linked novellas that focus on obsessive relationships, stolen identities, and illusions of grandeur in the post-1989 Carpathian-Balkan region: An American expat in Europe appropriates the identity of a Romanian orphan in her desperate search for love. A dictator’s daughter learns, while on a study trip to France, that her parents have been overthrown and are about to be executed. A minor character from a novel confronts her own insignificance. A wife announces to her husband of forty years that she’s just been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Short bios:

Maria Rybakova is a writer who published several novels and short story collections in her native Russian and one novella collection in English. She is a recipient of several literary prizes. She held a NEC fellowship in 2017-18, and a Fulbright U.S. Scholar fellowship in Romania in 2019-20. She is currently teaching literature at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan.

Marina Vraciu is a teacher of English and Russian {Associate Professor) at the Alexandru loan Cuza University in lași, where she teaches linguistics, philology, translation studies and works in the teams of some projects on second language teaching and Biblical studies. She has also taught Russian literature. She has translated from Russian and English into Romanian texts of various genres -early, classic and modern Russian literature (some of them represent the first versions in Romanian) as well as some writings from Romanian into both languages. She wrote several books on Russian cultural studies.

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3) Cătălin PAVEL (Author) and Metin OMER (Translator)                                                                       

Translating Cătălin Pavel, Animalele care ne fac oameni. Blană, cozi și pene în arheologie (Humanitas, 2021)/ The Animals that Made us Human. Fur, Tails, and Feathers in archaeology/ Bizi insan yapan hayvanlar. Arkeolojide kürk, kuyruk ve tüyler  from Romanian into Turkish

Abstract:

Cătălin Pavel’s Animalele care ne fac oameni. Blană, cozi și pene în arheologie (Humanitas, 2021) is a non-fiction volume of archaeology/history that bridges the gap between academia and the general public. Born out of a science communication project, it retains a substantial bibliography, but no footnotes. In it, Pavel investigated the way humans interacted with animals – chapters on dogs, cats, horses, but also whales, hedgehogs, birds, and bears – throughout prehistory and the Classical Antiquity. Pavel set off to study, with archaeological methods, the interaction between human persons and non-human persons, and to prove that animals have been a major catalyst of our cognitive and emotional development.

Short bios:

Cătălin Pavel is an Assistant Professor of Archaeology at Ovidius University, Constanța, where he also coordinates PhDs. He directs the University’s archaeological mission in Histria. Pavel received (post) doctoral fellowships in Oxford, Paris, Hamburg and at the NEC. He is also a scientific researcher at the Institute for the History of Religions, Romanian Academy. He is the author of four academic books and five novels. His Archaeology of Love (Humanitas, 2019) was translated into French and Italian.

Metin Omer (Ph.D 2018, Hacettepe University, Ankara) is a researcher at the Black Sea Institute at Ovidius University of Constanța and a Gerda Henkel Foundation Fellow. He studies e.g. the integration of Muslim communities in the Balkans in the XX and XXIst Centuries. He published an academic monograph and co-edited four further volumes, the most recent at Peter Lang (2021):  The Empire. Between dispute and nostalgia. Dr. Omer is fully bilingual and translated articles by K. H. Karpat and M. Seyitdanlıoğlu from Turkish into Romanian.