Language and sign in Spain

Last summer she worked for two weeks at La Casa del traductor (translators' house) in Tarazona and then three weeks as a traductor de literatura catalana in residèndia at the Institut Ramon Llull (The Catalan Literature Fund) in Barcelona.

La Casa del traductor is located in the oldest district of Tarazona, on top of a hill and near the Jewish quarter with its "hanging houses". These have been beautifully restored, but otherwise the district is quite run down, which has its charm. Tarazona is a small provincial town and within a few days the whole neighborhood knows who you are and what you are doing there. In the old building (previously it served as a retirement home), everyone has their own room with shower and toilet and there is a large shared kitchen where they can eat together. Most translators go their own way and keep the rhythm of their home countries. The very young intern from Zaragoza, who was away from home for the first time, could hardly get used to this individualism and soon we were sitting down to a warm meal together, every day at about 2:30 p.m.

A translation residency is actually not very different from an art residency. In both cases you stay for a period of time in a different environment, far away from your daily worries, social contacts and other distractions in order to gain new impressions, meet new people, explore new possibilities and collect material and ideas for new work. Or just to be able to work quietly and with concentration for a limited period of time. It gave me new writers, translators and artists and beautiful baroque music by the Czech composer Jan Dismas Zelenka, received from the Czech Jiřsí Kasl, who always tiptoed around the house because he didn't want to disturb anyone. He was working on a play and his Spanish sounded wonderfully old-fashioned, as if he had picked up his words from dusty books. An ideal character for a short story.

Or just to be able to work quietly and with concentration for a limited period of time.

During my stay at the translators' house, poetry readings with music were organized and we visited the beautiful cathedral in Tarazona, also called the Sistine Chapel of the Spanish Renaissance, recently opened after years of restoration. Parts of it are built in the typical mudéjar style, a mixture of Moorish and Christian architecture. In the old part of Tarazona you will see many buildings in the Aragonese variation of the mudéjar style.

I had very optimistically brought drawing materials and paper, but translating does not seem to go well with drawing for me, the same thing happens when I am working on a text about my work or on a grant application. Therefore, besides working on the translation of Germà de gel, a brother of ice, by visual artist and writer Alicia Kopf, I only had time to collect ideas and photos, brainstorm about an artist's book of my interventions and wander around the town.

In Barcelona, of course, the cultural offerings are much larger and more varied than in Tarazona, and at times it was difficult not to constantly give in to the temptations of the city.

The residency in Barcelona was very different. The apartments of the Institut Ramon Llull are located a bit outside of Barcelona on the Bellaterra campus. Although several people are invited at the same time, you never meet each other, because you basically don't share anything with the other translators. Only in the last week did I meet a Greek translator during the public conversation with 'his' writer in the institute's library. In Barcelona, of course, the cultural offer is much larger and more varied than in Tarazona, and sometimes it was hard not to constantly give in to the city's temptations. Even though I was invited primarily to work on my translation, I also wanted to take the opportunity to establish contacts with artists and visit many exhibitions.

The Institut Ramon Llull, in collaboration with the Fundació Han Nefkens, organized an evening on translation in the institute's library, a beautiful modernist building in the center of Barcelona. The Fundació Han Nefkens aims to bring people together by supporting different artistic disciplines and also wants to connect literature and art, for example.

The idea was that Alicia as a writer visual artist and I as a translator visual artist would have a conversation about translating her book. Germà de gel is part of Àrticantartic, an exploration of exploration, a series of conceptual works on a theme that has long fascinated her: snow, cold, and polar explorers. The book itself is a personal exploration of that fascination, in which she comes to the conclusion that she also needs to tell about her family, her autistic brother, and her life as a budding artist.

Although Alicia Kopf - or Imma Ávalos, Alicia Kopf is a pseudonym - translated her work into Spanish herself, I noticed that we didn't have much in common as translators, but we did as artists. A certain stillness in our work, for example. Besides cold and ice, Alicia's book is about conquistas (conquests), the conquest of the white space of the Arctic Circle as a metaphor for the conquest of the blank sheet of paper. My starting points for now are space, color and line - no texts. In an intuitive way I make drawings of spaces and spaces of drawings. Also a conquest. According to Alicia, conceptual work can very well be intuitive. With her, at least, it is. "Les imatges s'avancen sempre al pensament", the image always comes before thinking, we agreed on that. You can sense an image at first without seeing it concretely in front of you; you can't quite grasp it then, can't put your finger on it, but it's there. It is strange to be working on the same book and yet not be able to share it. I was in the middle of it, while Alicia was already working on another book. And of course she can't read my Dutch translation.

Alicia thought it was special to come across an artist who also engages in writing, she didn't really know any examples. I have the idea that there are more and more artists who also write. A translator is not a writer, but translation is a creative process, a translation, like an art work, is a recreation or an interpretation. You could see artistic expression as an exercise in translation. The creative process of a translator is similar to that of an artist. It's amazing how you can stare at a sheet of paper for hours, break your head and grit your teeth without any results, only to suddenly have a great inspiration while making coffee, brushing your teeth or in the shower.

The creative process of a translator is similar to that of an artist. It's amazing how you can stare at a sheet of paper for hours, break your head and grit your teeth without any results, only to suddenly have a great inspiration while making coffee, brushing your teeth or in the shower.

The Belgian painter Raoul de Keyser claimed that his best ideas came when he didn't really have time. If his wife was already standing at the bottom of the stairs with her coat on, so to speak, in order to go out together, his work would suddenly go very well and he would know what was still missing from his drawing. You can't consciously do something else to provoke an inspiration or association. Such a thing only happens unconsciously, through a detour. Just as you can't look Medusa directly in the eye because you'll turn into a stone, an idea also seems to turn to stone if you look at it too long. Working without preconceived ideas goes better. That doesn't mean the work comes out of nowhere, everything is stored in your head in some way. Intuition is not a divine inspiration, but a matter of experience. So for me, a residency is also about gaining experience, collecting ideas and images.

Something that both an artist and a translator run into is the need to make choices. Ultimately, you have to make choices in order to complete your drawing, your translation. And what initially seemed beautiful, eventually fails because it doesn't fit well, doesn't cover the load, falls out of tune. Kill your darlings, this also applies to translators.

While translating I often make lists of favorite words and think of possible titles for an installation or an exhibition. I am fascinated by architecture and take pictures of buildings or cut-outs of them, (distorted) patterns in paving stones and lines and shadows in the city that I use for my work. In Tarazona, the coordinator of the translators' house showed me a large collection of dummies of poetry books that the first director had handmade in the 1980s - before the digital age. Bound with colored thread, the stenciled booklets were each works of art with collages, embellishments in the margin, deletions and corrections. In Barcelona I saw the work of an artist friend of mine who also writes. In his exhibition, in addition to videos, he showed beautiful written and drawn sketchbooks. They reminded me of the booklets I make with drawings and collages of cut-out sentences (for example, from Lorca's poems). We thought about an exhibition with the dummies from the translators' house, his booklets and mine. Perhaps in the future we will manage to find a space to realize that idea.

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