Exercises in Translation

From 2002 to 2004 Présence Suisse funded a 'Swiss Fellow in the UK' programme in five universities in the four regions of the United Kingdom which enabled a Swiss writer or academic to be based in one university and to undertake short visits to the other four. Three Swiss Fellows, each writing in one of the official languages of Switzerland, took part.
This book marks the success of the programme and the events which it generated by assembling contributions from participants and organisers and from others involved in Swiss studies in the United Kingdom. The essays deal with aspects of perception and mediation which occur in the interchange between two countries. There are views of each country acquired by citizens of the other through travel or short sojourns; comments on the effect on their writing from writers who have adopted the other country by living there permanently; and accounts of interchange through critical appreciation, translation and cultural borrowing.

The Editors: Joy Charnley is Lecturer in French at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. Her research focuses on the work of French-speaking Swiss women writers, in particular Yvette Z'Graggen and Anne-Lise Grobéty. With Malcolm Pender, she co-edited five volumes of the Occasional Papers in Swiss Studies and is currently finishing a book on Yvette Z'Graggen. Malcolm Pender is Emeritus Professor of German Studies at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. His main research interests are in literature in German after 1945, with special reference to the literature of German-speaking Switzerland on which he has published extensively; his last book was Contemporary Images of Death and Sickness: A Theme in German-Swiss Literature (1998).

Contents: Alexis Lautenburg: Foreword - Joy Charnley/Malcolm Pender: Introduction - Thérèse Moreau: Deathwatch - Silvia Ricci Lempen: That's me there on the Photo - Donal McLaughlin: Mitbringsel - Joy Charnley: Portrait of a Poet: An Interview with Marie-José Piguet - Kate Griffiths/Laura Rorato: Voicing Difference: An Interview with Silvia Ricci Lempen - Felicity Rash: Early British Travellers to Switzerland 1611-1860 - Sue Wilson: An Early Nineteenth-century English Swiss Cottage at Endsleigh in Devon - Tom Hubbard: Austere Intoxications: Literary Relations between Scotland and Switzerland from 1782 to the Present - Malcolm Pender: August Corrodi's Contribution to Perceptions of Robert Burns in Nineteenth-century German-speaking Europe.