Translation is at the heart of our recent collaboration with UNESCO Cities of Literature, The Letters Page, Vol. 5. To celebrate the involvement of the nine incredible translators who worked with us on this project, this week we spoke to Olivia Hellewell, translator of Manca Renko’s letter from Slovenia’s capital Ljubljana, about her thoughts on and experiences with translation.
‘Editing between us is lovingly done and always with the reader in mind. The shared responsibility makes us more attentive’, reveals The Letter Page’s Web Editor Elodie Edwards. Her fellow Web team member Zoe Lidbury agrees, noting how ‘through shared authorship comes new perspectives, stronger writing, and a great capacity for compromise’.
At The Letters Page, we believe that Christmas cards are so much more than sentiment: they are imbued with meaning through their simple physicality and personal touches. We think that the impersonal buzz of an electronic notification shouldn’t be allowed to replace the rattle of the letterbox and the satisfying thud of Christmas post on the doormat.
Laura and Irene both speak of their personal relationship with letter writing. Laura is apt to send letters to whoever on her Facebook friends list wants one, while Irene sends long digital letters in the form of emails to a friend in New York. In a beautiful analogy, Laura then compares letter writing to kintsugi.
Cities, like letters, are layered; they’re contradictory and defined by presence and absence working simultaneously. Marius Burokas’ Vilnius-inspired letter serves as a reminder that both cities and the self remain open – they’re unfixed and contain the ability to be superimposed, but yet never erased.
The myth of Robin Hood has travelled far beyond its own home forest. Outside Prague’s main train station lies Vrchlického Sady, known by locals as Sherwood. This urban park doesn’t hold the legendary history of heroism that permeates Nottingham’s popular forest, but rather incorporates through literature the darker aspects of Prague’s culture.
In this day and age, writing morally calls for recognising that every sentence is written inside a burning house. To write anyway is not an act of purity but an act of responsibility. It is not putting out the fire, but bearing witness to its heat, its smoke, and the people trapped inside.
There is, in Jon’s words, ‘a weird tension’ between The Letters Page’s insistence on physical submissions and its simultaneous reliance on digital media. The journal mandates that submissions are sent via post and yet Jon admits that the journal ‘wouldn’t exist’ without the digital tools which are vital for its production.
Sitting down with Jon, are intrigued to learn what drew him to the epistolary theme in the first place. ‘It’s not so much that letters are important, as interesting. There’s more information in a letter that comes in the post – it’s an object that’s moved through space to get to you.’
What began as an unsuspecting blog page, advertising itself as ‘the letters page for a journal that doesn’t yet exist‘, soon morphed into a professionally produced journal of which every page was a letters page.
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