Herta Müller, Nobel Prize in Literature in 2009, takes part at the UB in a colloquium on her work
Marisa Siguán, professor of German Literature at the UB, and Isabel García Adánez, translator, will also take part in it. The event will begin one hour prior to the talk “In jeder Sprache sitzen andere Augen” (Every language sees the world through its own eyes), a reflection on the construction of the metaphorical language of the writer, given by Dr. Siguán. The colloquium at the UB is mainly aimed at experts, researchers and students of Germanic Languages and is one of the scheduled events in her visit to Barcelona, together with a colloquium at the Goethe Institute on Monday 25 June; the exhibition “Herta Müller. The Vicious Circle of Words”, and the talk “Language as Homeland” at the CCCB on Tuesday 26 June.
When Herta Müller was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature three years ago, the Swedish Academy described her as a writer “who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed”. Poet, novelist and essayist, Müller, unknown to the public until she received this award, writes of the horror of dictatorship in Romania and the unmoored existence of those who, due to Ceaucescuʼs regime, were forced to go into exile.
Marisa Siguán, professor of German Literature at the UB, and Isabel García Adánez, translator, will also take part in it. The event will begin one hour prior to the talk “In jeder Sprache sitzen andere Augen” (Every language sees the world through its own eyes), a reflection on the construction of the metaphorical language of the writer, given by Dr. Siguán. The colloquium at the UB is mainly aimed at experts, researchers and students of Germanic Languages and is one of the scheduled events in her visit to Barcelona, together with a colloquium at the Goethe Institute on Monday 25 June; the exhibition “Herta Müller. The Vicious Circle of Words”, and the talk “Language as Homeland” at the CCCB on Tuesday 26 June.
When Herta Müller was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature three years ago, the Swedish Academy described her as a writer “who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed”. Poet, novelist and essayist, Müller, unknown to the public until she received this award, writes of the horror of dictatorship in Romania and the unmoored existence of those who, due to Ceaucescuʼs regime, were forced to go into exile.
Herta Müller was born into a Banat Swabian family in western Romania. She is from the German minority in Romania, most of whom left the country during the eighties. Müller studied German and Romanian Literature at the University of Timisoara and her early literary works —Niederungen (English title: Nadirs), a collection of stories, and the novel Drückender Tango (Oppressive Tango)— were censored by Ceaucescuʼs regime. When she openly criticised the dictatorship, she was forbidden to publish. Meanwhile, her work was gaining recognition in Germany, where she moved in 1987. She currently lives in Berlin and her works, written in German, have been translated into 21 languages. In Spain, Siruela, Mondadori and Plaza y Janés publish her books. Some of her most important books have recently been translated into Catalan: L'home és un gran faisà en el món, La bèstia del cor, Tot el que tinc ho duc al damunt and En terres baixes, all published by Edicions Bromera.
Marisa Siguán is professor of German Literature at the University of Barcelona and external fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS), at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg. Since 2000 she has been coordinator of the doctoral program Construction and Representation of Cultural Identities at the Faculty of Philology of the UB and she has also taught in a Masterʼs degree, which has the same name, at the UB since it was first introduced. Her areas of research and teaching focus primarily on the German-Spanish literary relationships at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, German literature of the modern period and the relationship between traumatic memory and writing in the 20th and 21st centuries. She has published, among others, La recepción de Ibsen y Hauptmann en el modernismo catalán, Historia de la literatura alemana (co-authored with Hans Gerd Rötzer), Transkulturelle Beziehungen (co-authored with Karl Wagner), and Goethe: obra narrativa. She has been invited to teach and lecture at several universities including those of Santiago de Compostela, Seville, the Basque Country, Complutense of Madrid, Valencia, Trier, Vienna, Freiburg, Würzburg, Zurich, Rome III, London and Wisconsin-Madison. She is a founding member of the Association of German Teachers in Catalonia and the Goethe Society in Spain, where she is the president. She belongs to the international scientific committee of the Institute for the German Language.
Isabel García Adánez holds a PhD in German Studies, a Bachelorʼs degree in German and Hispanic Studies and a Diploma in Piano Performance and Music Theory. Her research focuses on German Literature in the 19th and 20th centuries and the relationships between literature and other arts, especially music and cinema. She is currently lecturer from the Department of German Studies at the Complutense University of Madrid and literary translator, specialising in the German classics (Thomas Mann, Joseph Roth, Arthur Schnitzler, Theodor Fontane, Heinrich Heine). She also translates films and theatre plays and collaborates on a regular basis with Teatro Real and Teatro de la Zarzuela, two theatres located in Madrid.