site.btaFour Translators, Researchers to Join Sofia Literature, Translation House Residency Programme in 2024

Translators and researchers from Belgium, Spain, the UK, France, and Italy, are the first participants in the 2024 Sofia Literature and Translation House Residency Programme, the organizers said.

Belgian researcher and lecturer Michel De Dobbeleer will take part in the Programme in March and April. He is an expert in Slavic, Classical and Italian studies, with knowledge in Russia, Bulgarian and Church Slavonic. He has taught courses and seminars on translation from Russian into Dutch at the Universities of Ghent and Leuven, and has co-adapted a course on Bulgarian language.

In Sofia, he will visit libraries and interview translators in connection with his research on the reception of Dutch and Flemish literature in Bulgaria during communism.

Spanish translator and poet Marco Vidal Gonzalez will begin his residency in Sofia in July. He has graduated in Slavic philology with a major in Russian, Czech, and Bulgarian. Gonzalez has numerous publications in literary magazines and has written two collections of poetry in Bulgarian. Gonzalez has translated works of more than 120 Bulgarian poets. He is the author of the La Tortuga Búlgará blog and the founder of a publishing house of the same name.

During his residency, he will be working on his translation of a novella by Alexander Vutimski.

In July, the project will be joined by Yana Ellis, who works in the UK and France. She is a translator from Bulgarian and German into English, an editor, and a language teacher. In 2022, she was selected as one of the American Literary Translators Association's Fellows. During her stay at the Literature and Translation House, Ellis will be working on her translation of Yordanka Beleva's Hedgehogs Come Out at Night.

Italy’s Giorgia Spadoni is also joining the project this summer. She works as a translator, teacher, and editor. Her Italian translation of the short story collection Circo Bulgaria by Deyan Enev has been published by Bottega Errante Edizioni in 2023. During her second creative residency in Sofia, she will be working on her next projects for the translation of contemporary Bulgarian authors into Italian, which she will present to Italian publishers.

The residency of Marco Vidal Gonzalez, Yana Ellis, and Giorgia Spadoni is supported by Culture Moves Europe, a project funded by the European Union and the National Culture Fund, Bulgaria.