Yesterday I attended the annual AALITRA Symposium here in Melbourne at the Boyd Library in Southbank, and had a most interesting time. The event was very well attended and arriving just shortly before it started, I was lucky to get a seat. I think some people must have come without booking in beforehand, and who can blame them, this is always a beaut event for anyone interested in translation, and – thanks to the Copyright Agency, it’s free.
The program featured Alice Pung in conversation with Leah Gerber from Monash about Pung’s experience of literary translation. There was some preliminary discussion about the past practice of labelling books as ‘ethnic literature’ or ‘migrant literature’ which had a kind of silo effect along with assumptions about a set of tropes that distinguished it from ‘Australian literature’. In this context Pung made an interesting remark about Anh Do’s book The Happiest Refugee: A Memoir which she said is popular with people…
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