Date/Time
Date(s) - 10/19/2018
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Categories No Categories
Susan will read excerpts from her most recent translation, Jenny Erpenbeck’s “Go, went, gone” (gehen, ging, gegangen). The novel is about Richard, a retired classics professor who lives in Berlin. Richard lives a routine existence until one day he spies some African refugees staging a hunger strike. Curiosity turns to compassion, as he visits their shelter and becomes embroiled in their harrowing fates. Go, Went, Gone is a scathing indictment of Western policy toward the European refugee crisis, but also a touching portrait of a man who finds he has more in common with the Africans than he realizes.
Exquisitely translated by Susan Bernofsky, Go, Went, Gone addresses one of the most pivotal issues of our time, facing it head-on in a voice that is both nostalgic and frightening.
There will be a short Q&A session after the reading.
Portland State University, SMSU Parkway North (Room 101)
This event is part of the “Wunderbar Together” Initiative, celebrating 50 years of transatlantic friendship, and is hosted by Portland State University and co-sponsored by Reed College.
About Susan Bernofsky:
Bernofsky is known for her translations of Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha (Modern Library, 2006), Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (Norton, 2014), and Jeremias Gotthelf’s 19th-Century horror story The Black Spider (NYRB Classics, 2013). Her translation of Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel The End of Days won the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, The Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize, the Ungar Award for Literary Translation, and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Her translation of the novel Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada won the 2017 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. Her most recent translation is Jenny Erpenbeck’s award-winning novel Go, went, gone (2017).
