Drenka's sake

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Drenka Willen (born in 1928 near Zagreb , Kingdom of Yugoslavia ) is a Yugoslav-US-American publisher and translator.

Life

Drenka fled to Belgrade with her sister and mother during World War II in 1941 after her brother, father and numerous relatives were murdered. During the war she learned German, then Russian and English. She went to England in 1949, where she studied at Birmingham University . Between 1953 and 1956 she was an English teacher at the University of Belgrade . In 1956 she married an American from New York City and moved to the United States. From 1961 she worked as a freelance translator from Serbo-Croatian for the Harcourt publishing house when she was commissioned by William Jovanovich to translate short stories by Ivo Andric . She then edited the autobiography of Milovan Djilas .

From 1981 she worked as a permanent editor for Harcourt and took over from Helen Wolff the management of the foreign language authors department Helen and Kurt Wolff Books , whose authors included Umberto Eco , Georges Simenon and Günter Grass . She won over the authors Octavio Paz , José Saramago and Wisława Szymborska and proofread the translations. Other authors she won for the publishing house were Yehuda Amichai , Italo Calvino , Margaret Drabble , Abraham B. Jehoshua , Ryszard Kapuściński , Danilo Kiš , Stanislaw Lem , Cees Nooteboom , Amos Oz , Arturo Perez-Reverte and Charles Simic . In 1990 she published it under the title Too Loud a Solitude Bohumil Hrabals Příliš hlučna samota , for which Willen engaged Michael Henry Heim as translator. From the English language literature she supervised a. a. David Guterson and Claire Messud .

Willen bought the rights to Memorial do Convento von Saramago in the 1980s and held on to it, although she could not sell more than 3,000 of the 5,000 printed copies of this and three other books she edited. The publisher was able to sell 20,000 copies of the City of the Blind , which was before the Nobel Prize. In the end it turned out that Willen had four Nobel Prize winners for literature among their authors with their English translations.

In 1998 she received the "PEN / Roger Klein Editorial Award". When her workplace fell victim to a company restructuring in December 2008, Grass organized an international protest at the company's management. This gave way and Willen was reinstated in January. Will was in the process of preparing the fiftieth anniversary of the tin drum's appearance with a new translation by Breon Mitchell .

Willen was honored with the sixth “Lifetime Achievement Award” of the London Book Fair in 2009 , the keynote address was given by Umberto Eco. In 2013 she received the newly awarded Ottaway Prize from Words Without Borders , while the poeta laureatus Charles Simic , who “like Hitler and Stalin as travel agents”, dedicated his poem On This Very Street in Belgrade about his return to Belgrade, years later.

Translations (selection)

Bohumil Hrabal: Too Loud Solitude
Sal Robinson: a good description of the way she reads and feels about literature
  • Ivo Andric : The Vizier's elephant: three novellas . New York: Harcourt, 1961
  • Mihajlo Lalić : The Wailing Mountain . New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965
  • Matija Bećković ; Dušan Radović : Che: A permanent tragedy . New York: Harcourt, 1970
  • Milovan Đilas : Memoir of a revolutionary . New York: Harcourt, 1973
  • Ivan Kušan : The mystery of the stolen painting . Illustrations Charles Robinson. New York: Harcourt, 1975

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Gayle Feldman: The Virtues Of Continuity , in: Publishers Weekly , October 21, 2002
  2. ↑ a b c Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg: Found in Translation: An Editor's Life , October 12, 2004
  3. ↑ a b Leon Neyfakh: Drenka Will Returns! Günter Grass' Editor Hauled Back to HMH , The Observer , January 6, 2009
  4. ^ A b Sal Robinson: Editor Drenka Willen wins new international literature prize , at Melville House Books, May 16, 2013
  5. ^ German title All too loud loneliness
  6. ↑ Cees Nooteboom : The Conqueror on the Book Ladder , Essay, in: NZZ , April 2, 2016, p. 21
  7. ^ Announcing The James H. Ottaway Jr. Award for the Promotion of International Literature , at Words without Borders
  8. ^ Photo by Drenka Willen and the poem Simic 'at Susan Harris: Celebrating WWB and Drenka Willen: Our Tenth Anniversary Gala , Words without Borders, October 31, 2013
  9. ^ Text from Bohumil Hrabal: Solitude too loud . Board on the "Library Walk", Manhattan
personal data
SURNAME Will, Drenka
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Yugoslav-US-American publishing editor and translator
DATE OF BIRTH 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH near Zagreb , Kingdom of Yugoslavia