Dr Rey Conquer publishes a book based on Holocaust Centre North residency

Summary of the book:

Conversation Time is a collection of translations from letters written between 1938 and 1945 by refugees from and victims of the Nazi genocide. The selection focuses on greetings, formulae, writing about writing – the ordinary and repeated phrases that people used to express themselves to friends and family members from whom they were separated, not knowing when or if they would receive a reply. Stories of displacement and persecution, anxiety and longing are communicated indirectly, pressing through from behind the written repetitions and everyday language, visible to us through the letters’ dates. Conversation Time addresses the challenges of translating these letters now – how to convey their ordinariness, what it means to be a human translator in an age of machines, and how to let resonances between the letters, and between the letters and the present, sound out.

See more about Dr Rey Conquer's work here.