Translations

9781474273305My translation of Brecht’s unfinished play The Real Life of Jacob Trotalong (Das wirkliche Leben des Jakob Gehherda) was published in January 2019, in the collection of Brecht’s dramatic fragments that I co-edited with Tom Kuhn (Bloomsbury). It was immensely enjoyable to translate this piece, which plays around with expressionistic and epic techniques and employs an enormous range of styles – dream sequences mean that the action can suddenly shift from the bar-room of a 1930s inn to the overplayed chivalry of a medieval joust.

I was also one of the translators for the new collection of Bertolt Brecht’s theoretical writings on peformance, Brecht on Performance (Bloomsbury, 2014). I focused in particular on Brecht’s ‘Modelbooks’ – the manuals that he produced for some of his most-performed plays.

Brecht on Performance

I translated one of the chapters in Zwei Wochen England, a collection of texts by former writers-in-residence at the Austrian Cultural Forum. In ‘The Blitz Experience’, Bettina Balaka reflects on a visit to the Imperial War Museum during her stay in London, and its odd mix of entertainment and memorialisation:

Bettina Balaka, ‘The Blitz Experience’, Heide Kunzelmann (ed.), Zwei Wochen England (Sonderzahl, 2012), pp. 72-104

Zwei Wochen England

I have translated a non-fiction title on the Gestapo for Oxford University Press. Despite the rather gruelling subject matter, I liked the fact that the book was written by historians keen to make this part of history more accessible and comprehensible.

Carsten Dams & Michael Stolle, The Gestapo (OUP, 2014)

The Gestapo