Amerika Haus NRW Lecture

»Talking in Tongues«

featuring Peter Wortsman, writer and translator, New York City.

In his lecture “Talking in Tongues”, Peter Wortsman talked about the art of translation and about the writing as a way to process  the experiences of oneself and those of others. He took his audience on a journey of the works of the Brothers Grimm and  Robert Musil and of the many interviews with Holocaust survivors, he has collected and translated. In doing so, he, at the same time, retraced his own path of life as a writer and translator.

Being the first-generation American-born son of Austrian-Jewish immigrants and married to a French wife, Peter Wortsman has always "felt a bit culturally off-kilter and linguistically befuddled." He grew up speaking Austrian-German and "New Yawk"-English, always having to keep his young, private sphere of German separate from the language of daily public discourse. This, he says, resulted in many a private joke in his German-speaking family. At the end of the day, he did walk this fine cultural and linguistic line very successfully: His English rendering of Posthumous Papers of a Living Author by Robert Musil has been called “a classic in itself.” And Wortsman’s other highly esteemd translations from German literture include works by such famous poets as Heinrich Heine and Heinrich von Kleist.

Peter Wortsman is also the author of short fiction, theatre plays, travel writings and a book of Art. In 1985 the New York-based writer was awarded the Beard’s Fund Short Story Award and in 2008 he received the Geertje Potash-Suhr Prose Award of the Society for Contemporary American Literature in German.

Peter Wortsman is currently fellow in residence at American Academy in Berlin.