"Translations of complex literary works are increasingly the domain of independent publishers"

Interview with Kiki Coumans

Author(s)

  • Annelies Schulte Nordholt Leiden University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.51777/relief10889

Keywords:

translation, independant publishing houses, translator, poetry, novel, Netherlands

Abstract

Kiki Coumans is one of the most prominent translators of French literature in the Netherlands at the moment. Through her numerous translations and essays, she has proven to be a mediator of modern and contemporary novel and poetry, with a preference for stylistically exacting and sometimes experimental texts. Along with her activity as a translator, she wrote many essays in which she comments on the translated books and justifies her choices comparing them to other translations. In this exclusive interview, Kiki Coumans also talks about her adventures in the archives and the added value of writers’ manuscripts for literary translation.

Author Biography

  • Annelies Schulte Nordholt, Leiden University

    Annelies Schulte Nordholt teaches French literature at Leiden University. She authored books on Blanchot and Proust, and numerous articles on modern and contemporary literary, as well as the essay Perec, Modiano, Raczymow. La génération d’après et la mémoire de la Shoah (Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2008). She currently works on the representation of urbain space in post-war literature, and is preparing a book on “lieux de mémoire” in the work of Georges Perec.

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Published

2021-07-07

Issue

Vol. 15 No. 1 (2021): (Re)translating the French classics

Section

Interviews

License

Copyright (c) 2021 Annelies Schulte Nordholt

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

All articles published in RELIEF appear in Open Access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0). Under this licence, authors retain ownership of the copyright of their article, but they allow its unrestricted use, provided it is properly cited.

How to Cite

Schulte Nordholt, A. (2021) “‘Translations of complex literary works are increasingly the domain of independent publishers’: Interview with Kiki Coumans”, RELIEF - REVUE ÉLECTRONIQUE DE LITTÉRATURE FRANÇAISE, 15(1), pp. 166–175. doi:10.51777/relief10889.