| 22 Oct 2016 | 11:00am - 12:00pm | Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge, CB3 9DT | |
- Description
Description
Booking for this event opens on Monday 26 September at 10.30am (BST).
A Festival of Ideas event at CRASSH.
Translator and literary critic Ángel Gurría-Quintana talks about the challenges of translating into English Dulce Maria Cardoso’s The Return, an award-winning novel about the white colonists forced to flee Angola after its independence from Portugal.
In the summer of 1975, in the bloody run-up to the independence of Portugal's African colonies, half a million mostly white colonists were forced to flee Angola and Mozambique and resettle in Portugal. They were called 'os retornados' (the returnees), though most had not been born, and hadn't ever set foot, in the 'motherland'.
Dulce Maria Cardoso's partly autobiographical novel tells the story of one of those returnees, teenage Rui, as he comes to terms with the harsh realities of becoming a forced migrant in a country that doesn't want him, while grappling with the experiences of coming of age.
In his talk, supported by CRASSH and Cambridge Conversations in Translation, literary critic and journalist Ángel Gurría-Quintana will discuss some of the challenges posed by the translation of a novel that reflects its characters’ geographical uprootedness and linguistic hybridity.
