Wednesday, September 10th 2025, starting with 17.30 CET, the Iași International Festival of Literature and Translation (FILIT), in collaboration with ARTLIT (the Romanian Association for Literary Translators), will host an online CELA masterclass with two experienced translators, Manuela Klenke from Germany and Corina Oproae from Spain.
The CELA presentation Migration and double identity – translators and writers as “double-agents” is part of the Literature as a Social Elevator Masterclass series offered by FILIT&ARTLIT. All the participants who signed up for this online meeting will join a presentation followed by a free dialogue with the two guest speakers. They will talk about how traditional translation school discourse claims that only a native speaker can be a literary translator. However, migration challenges the notion of “native speaker”, especially when it comes to small language combinations. Also, what’s in a writer’s name – do they bear their nationality? Writers’ nationality in their creation. Pros and cons.
Manuela Klenke (b. 1984). She was born in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, grew up bilingual and studied linguistics. She is living near Osnabrück for almost 20 years and working as a translator, editor, and curator. From Romanian, she has translated works by Lavinia Braniște, Florin Iaru, Camelia Iuliana Radu, and Livia Ștefan, among others. Into Romanian, she has translated Salutare, barbarilor! (Greetings, Barbarians!), an anthology of contemporary German poetry, as well as O poveste despre Germania noastră (Our Germany Fairytale) by Dinçer Güçyeter. She is currently working on translating a poetry anthology by the German author Durs Grünbein. For her work, she has received several grants and fellowships: a working grant from the German Translators’ Fund (2017), a translation fellowship from the State of Lower Saxony (2021), the Johann Joachim Christoph Bode Fellowship (2023), and the Radial Fellowship (2025).
Corina Oproae (b. 1973) is a Spanish Romanian poet, novelist and translator. She writes in Spanish and Catalan. Her books of poems are A thousand and one deaths (2016), Intermittencies (2018), The hand that trembles (2020), Where to love from (2021) and How to bury the father in a poem (2025). Her first novel, The lemon house, was awarded the prestigious Tusquets Publishers Prize for Novel in 2024 in Spain. She translates from Romanian and English into Catalan and Spanish. She has translated authors such as Lucian Blaga, Gellu Naum, Marin Sorescu (Cavall Verd – Rafel Jaume Poetical Translation Award 2014), Ana Blandiana (Jordi Domènech Poetical Translation Award 2015), Ioan Es. Pop, Svetlana Cârstean, Angela Marinescu, Tatiana Țîbuleac, Matei Vișniec, Mary Oliver or Sholeh Wolpé. She is the author and translator of the anthology 20th century poetry in Romania (2022). Corina Oproae was part of the CELA#1 project.
The masterclass is part of Connecting Emerging Literary Artists (CELA), a talent development project for the new generation of European literary voices across 11 different countries, supported by Creative Europe of the European Union.
