MAKING-OF: A JOUNRAL ON THE JOURNAL

By Sinéad Crowe, Isabelle Liber und María Tellechea

By now, the results of our work as translators are at various stages of being edited, printed, recommended by booksellers, ordered, bought, gifted, borrowed, and – most importantly – read! Meanwhile, our shared journey in the Daughters issue of the TOLEDO-Journal is coming to an end.

The year 2020 started with great promise for all three of us, but it soon brought tremendous uncertainty, fear and frustration. As a result of the pandemic, our diaries were suddenly eerily empty, with little prospect of improvement any time soon. In this strange year, working on the journal has helped keep us sane. While everything else was either cancelled or postponed, the TOLEDO-Journal deadline remained constant, which meant that we needed to keep working and keep in touch with each other. Of course, meeting in person was out of the question. Instead, over the course of five months, we:

More importantly, though, this journal gave us a fantastic opportunity to document the process that led to the translated novel. We are extremely grateful to TOLEDO, which is sponsored by the Deutscher Übersetzerfonds and the Robert Bosch Stiftung, for giving us this opportunity. We also wish to thank TOLEDO’s two amazing representatives at the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin (LCB), Aurélie Maurin und Kathrin Bach.

As we enjoyed preparing this three-woman journal so much, we thought we’d share a few peeks behind the scenes with you.

Journal meeting at the LCB on 5 March 2020. From left to right: María Tellechea, Isabelle Liber, Lucy Fricke, Sinéad Crowe

Journal meeting at the LCB on 5 March 2020: three copies of Töchter on their world travels

Marías notes with questions for Lucy and locations for the map

Sinéad’s notebook at our first meeting at the LCB on 5 March 2020

Constant companions: Isabelle’s book, notebook and pencil

Our brainstorming sessions continue in spite of the pandemic, different locations and the time difference

Isabelle jots down ideas for our article on pet names

A sketch of the route taken by the characters of Daughters

Sinéad, María and Isabelle toast (via WhatsApp) the arrival of advance copies of Daughters

Voice messages from Berlin, Buenos Aires and Hamburg: when you have lots of questions, ideas and words of encouragement, voice messages can be more convenient than texts ... 

Long discussions on WhatsApp as the translators try to visualise the structures in Bellegra’s cemetery

Berlin is ready for a video conference on 6 August 2020!

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