Wednesday, the 19th of February 2025, the Iași International Festival of Literature and Translation (FILIT), in collaboration with ARTLIT (the Romanian Association for Literary Translators), will host an online CELA masterclass with the Romanian writer Florin Bican, starting with 17.30 CET. With 40 people registered, the conference is fully booked.
The lecturer Florin Bican (n. 1956) is a Romanian writer, publisher and literary translator from English to Romanian. He was in charge of the Romanian Cultural Institute programme Translators in the making, training foreign translators of Romanian literature between 2006 and 2012 (at the time a newly created programme). He describes himself as “a compulsive translator of literature”.
“Back in the 1980’s a Romanian security police officer was trying to dissuade me from reading “foreign” books. In order to stress his point, he warned me that “unlike” Romanian writers, Western writers smuggled ideas behind their words”. Starting from this “warning”, I am going to discuss the perception of “words” (and of the ideas behind them) against a changeable background. In the course of my masterclass, I will be referring to such bibliography as André Lefevere’s Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame (London / New York, Routledge, 1992), Mona Baker’s In Other Words (Routledge, 1992) and Batja Mesquita’s Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions (New York, Norton, 2022). I will use as case studies the Swahili and Finnish translations of Lewis Carrol’s Alice books. I will also contribute insights from my own experience as author and translator and will invite the participants to share and discuss their own experiences and insights” (Florin Bican).
The masterclass is part of Connecting Emerging Literary Artists (CELA), a talent development project for the new generation of European literary voices across 11 different countries, supported by Creative Europe of the European Union.