We're thrilled to be hosting the U.S. book launch of the new English translation of Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek’s play, Her Not All Her- on/with Robert Walser [in the original: er nicht als er- zu/mit Robert Walser]. The award-winning translation by Damion Searls was recently published in the Cahier series by Sylph Editions in collaboration with the American University of Paris.Damion Searls received the 2011 ACF Translation Prize for his translation of Her Not All Her, Jelinek’s play about, from, and to the great Swiss writer Robert Walser. Searls will be participating in this event alongside editor Daniel Medin, and the novelist, Katie Kitamura. The reading takes place with the support of the journal The American Reader, which will be publishing an excerpt of the play in their magazine, and the Austrian Cultural Forum. “Writers, not unlike generals, often make the most tedious preparations before they proceed to the attack and bravely deliver your battles. Don’t leave your weapons at home all the time! Are you doing it on purpose? From the art of poetry war has arisen: People were bored by what they knew but they didn’t want to ask anything either. They wanted to answer right off. But there’s one thing they know for certain: Always conquer new ground! That’s what it means to be an artist!” - Jelinek ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTSDamion Searls is a writer in English and translator from German, French, Dutch, and Norwegian. He attended Harvard University, studying German philosophy, as well as receiving an education in American literature at UC Berkeley. Searls has translated writers including Proust, Rilke, Robert Walser, Ingeborg Bachmann, Thomas Bernhard, Kurt Schwitters, Peter Handke, Christa Wolf, Stephane Hessel, Jon Fosse, and Nescio and edited a one-volume abridged edition of Thoreau's Journal; his translation of Hans Keilson's Comedy in a Minor Keywas a New York Times Notable Book of 2010 and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist in Fiction. His own work includes What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going (short stories) and pieces in Harper's, The Believer, n+1, Bookforum, The Paris Review, and elsewhere.Daniel Medin teaches comparative literature at the American University of Paris, where he is associate director of The Center for Writers and Translators and an editor of the chapbooks collectively entitled The Cahier Series. He is Senior Editor of The Quarterly Conversation, Paris Editor of The American Reader, and he co-host of That Other Word, a podcast about literature in translation produced jointly with the Center for the Art of Translation. He curated a volume by and on Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai for Music & Literature magazine this spring.Author and critic Katie Kitamura studied at Princeton University and the University of London before becoming an Honorary Research Fellow at the London Consortium. Her novel The Longshot, published in 2009, was chosen as a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award and is currently being developed into a feature film by Peter Berg. It was followed by her second novel Gone to the Forest, a psychological examination of the destruction of a family, in 2012. In addition to her fictional works Kitamura has written for The New York Times, The Guardian and Wired, while regularly contributing to Frieze and Art Monthly.
