Antidote and Access: Literary Translation in the Blogosphere: Confluence Conference 2022
Montgomery College student and Potomac Review intern, Elly Sullivan, will interview Switzerland-based professional translator Catherine Sommer about her 30-year labor of love translating the poems of the 1966 Nobel Prize winning German poet, Nelly Sachs.
Sachs, born into a well-off Jewish family in Berlin, narrowly escaped Nazi Germany in 1940 and emigrated with her mother to Sweden.
Her escape hinged on her literary connection with Selma Lagerlof, herself the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature in 1909. In Sweden Sachs supported herself as a translator. She struggled with mental illness but persevered. She died of cancer four years after receiving the Nobel Prize in literature.