“And since I didn't want to let it get me down...”

Thomas Weiler, born in 1978 in the Black Forest, understands himself as someone who likes discovering small niches. His interest in the Slavic world led him not to Moscow, but to Belarus. In Minsk he volunteered with disabled people, learned Russian through Russian rock music and experimented as a translator, working on the Soviet children’s classic “Crocodile Gena and his friends”. Thomas liked the puzzling it required. The well-known German translator Swetlana Geier encouraged him to get involved with the adventure of translation. He went to Leipzig, studied translation, and discovered the Belarusian language and its literature. Today, Thomas translates from Belarusian, Polish and Russian. His repertoire extends from children’s literature across poetry to contemporary novels. Thomas understands the mediation of Belarusian literature as his mission. He has translated Alhierd Bacharevič, Viktor Martinowitsch, Ziemowit Szczerek and many others.

Thomas Reschke, born in 1932, experienced the beginning of the Second World War aged seven and its end aged thirteen. In 1945 he fled his home city of Gdansk and began studying Slavic studies in war-torn Berlin. In 1955 the state assigned him the job of editor at the publishing house “Kultur und Fortschritt”. As part of an “ideological leading company”, Thomas Reschke soon learned the value and the limits of freedom as it could be experienced in the workers’ and farmers’ state of the GDR. After the merger with “Volk und Welt” in 1964, Reschke worked in this leading GDR publishing house as an editor for almost 35 years. In 1956 he began translating. Since then he has become one of the most renowned translators from Russian into German. After reunification, he established himself as a freelancer, partly together with his wife Renate. He has translated, amongst others, Mikhail Bulgakov, Ilya Ilf & Yevgeny Petrov and Mikhail Shoshchenko.

Claudia Dathe was born in 1971 near Leipzig. She began to study Translation with Eastern European languages in the early 1990s, which were defined by turmoil. In the 1990s and early 2000s she spent several periods studying and working in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine, in order to get to know post-Soviet environments and gather experiences of transformation. In Kyiv, she witnessed the Orange Revolution in 2004/5. The kitchen of her friends in Kyiv, Mark Belorousets und Alla Zamanska became a place of encounter with intellectuals and early dissidents, of insight into the repressive years of the Soviet Union, and of discussions about literature and translation. Claudia Dathe began to learn Ukrainian. Today she is among the most active mediator of Ukrainian literature in Germany. She has translated Evgenia Belorusets, Marianna Kijanowska and Serhij Zhadan, amongst others.