“Translating the East, Translating the Self”
Chinese-born British author and film director Xiaolu Guo, recipient of the Samuel Fischer Visiting Professorship at the Peter Szondi Institute of Comparative Literature, Freie Universität, will hold her inaugural lecture on November 3
№ 191/2022 from Oct 27, 2022
At 6:00 p.m. on Thursday, November 3, 2022, Chinese-born British author and director Xiaolu Guo will hold her inaugural lecture as recipient of the Samuel Fischer Visiting Professorship at the Peter Szondi Institute of Comparative Literature, Freie Universität Berlin. Guo’s lecture, “Translating the East, Translating the Self,” will be held in English and discuss her experiences as a writer and director coming from China to Europe. Guo will talk about how she moves between different languages and cultures and address topics such as the art of literary translation, what it means to “translate the self,” and how to combine visual and verbal forms of expression. The lecture will begin at 6:00 p.m. in the Seminar Center, located in the Silberlaube building (Room L 116, Otto-von-Simson-Straße 26, 14195 Berlin), and will be broadcast as a livestream. Literary scholars Prof. Dr. Michael Gamper and Dr. David Wachter from the Peter Szondi Institute of Comparative Literature will open the event with a welcome address and introduction.
Xiaolu Guo is widely considered to be one of the most fascinating Chinese-British authors of our time. After graduating from Beijing Film Academy, she published six books in Chinese before moving to London in 2002. Soon after, she began writing in English. In her novels, Guo grapples with the complex interrelationships between migration, foreignness, and memory, as well as transnationality and translation. She gained a large following after the release of her award-winning film How Is Your Fish Today (2006). Guo achieved international success in 2008 with her novel A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, which has been translated into 26 languages and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. The film She, a Chinese, for which Guo received the Golden Leopard at Locarno Film Festival, was released the following year. In addition to her own writing and directing work, Guo has taught directing, literature, and creative writing at universities such as Harvard, Columbia, Zurich, and Bern. In 2012, she was granted a residency through the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD)’s Artists-in-Berlin Program. Retrospectives of her films have been shown at the Swiss Film Archive (2011), the Greek Film Archive (2018), and the Whitechapel Gallery in London (2019).
Further Information
Link to Livestream
https://fu-berlin.webex.com/meet/david.wachter
Contact
Dr. David Wachter, Peter Szondi Institute of Comparative Literature, Freie Universität Berlin, Tel.: +49 30 838-63296. Email: david.wachter@fu-berlin.de