Recorded June 27, 2023. An 'in conversation' event featuring Prof Jim Hicks (University of Massachusetts Amherst) in conversation with Dr Krzysztof Rowiński (TCD) organised by the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies. The heightened visibility of translators and interpreters, with Arrival (2016) or the 2021 controversy over translators of Amanda Gorman's presidential inauguration poem as prime examples, is a relatively new phenomenon. Just a few decades ago, things did seem rather different. In war interpreting, where the stakes are literally life and death, little if any work had been done. No one seemed to be asking many questions at all, much less the right ones. Jim Hicks will discuss his work on a series of interviews with interpreters who had worked during and after the 1992-95 war in Bosnia and a recent Italian novel that features an encounter in Trieste between two generations of refugees. Comparing these two projects will serve to suggest ways in which fiction may be used in the service of truth, and also that the truths we learn from fiction may not be accessible by any other means.

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