Today's episode features award-winning poet, an award-winning translator, an editor and a narrative non-fiction writer-at-large for Daily Maverick – Karin Schimke.
Karin has worked trained as a journalist and worked as a political writer. She has been a freelancer for the past two decades. Her features and news features have appeared in more than two dozen print publications and she currently writes features for the Daily Maverick and for Spotlight on issues from ventilators to food waste, hunger to domestic violence.
In 2013 she was the winner of the Sylt Foundation’s Writer Retreat, and a finalist in the South African Literary Awards for poetry. Karin was awarded the Ingrid Jonker Award for poetry for her debut poetry collection, Bare and Breaking, in 2014 and her second collection, Navigate was published in 2017. Karin has translated five books, edited seven more, authored another six, and contributed to six collections and anthologies. She won the South African Literary Awards Translation Award in 2016 and the Sol Plaatjie Translation award in 2019, both for the translation of Flame in the Snow – the Love Letters of Ingrid Jonker and Andre Brink.
In her acceptance speech she said:
“Translation is the rendering of meaning from one language into another. Translation is conversion. It is movement. A translator is able to change a reader’s understanding of the world, or, at the very least, supplement it. In the process of presenting the experiences of one language group to another, the essential literary by-product of imagination is switched on, and – as so much research over the years has shown – imagination is the route to empathy, and empathy the route to social change. Translation is a political act.”
I was lucky enough to include Karin’s writing in Living While Feminist titled. In her piece, Change, I think she did a fantastic job of translating the experiences of a changing body so that every reader would have been able to empathise and learn. She's just published her latest book - The Karen Book of Rules with Karen Jeynes.
