“Truth is A Story Someone Else Tells”: Translating Reportage

with
Daniella Gitlin (translator of Operation Massacre, Rodolfo Walsh)

&

Max Weiss (translator of A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution, Samar Yazbek)

Wednesday, October 23, 7PM

Barnard College
Barnard Hall, 4th fl, James Room
116th St and Broadway

Daniella Gitlin is a writer, translator, and editor. She studied comparative literature at Princeton University, spent a year in Buenos Aires working with the local affiliate of Transparency International, and received her MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University, where she also taught for two years. Daniella sits on the board of the Seven Stories Institute (SSI), an organization whose mission is to bring books to underserved communities. She is active in SSI’s main program, Word UP, an all volunteer-run general-interest community bookshop in northern Manhattan. Operation Massacre is her first book-length translation.

Rodolfo Walsh’s Operation Massacre (Seven Stories, 2013) is a classic of reportage, never before translated; originally published in 1957, it is the story of Walsh’s obsession with and investigation into the 1956 massacre of eighteen men in Argentina in the wake of a failed Peronist uprising.

“Walsh not only exposes a terrible crime with precise and haunting prose, but establishes, many years before Capote and Mailer, a whole new genre of personal investigative journalism that transcends its immediate circumstances.”   —Ariel Dorfman

♦

Max Weiss is the Elias Boudinot Preceptor and Assistant Professor of History and Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. He is the author of In the Shadow of Sectarianism: Law, Shi’ism, and the Making of Modern Lebanon (Harvard University Press, 2010), and the translator, most recently, of Samar Yazbek’s A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution (Haus Publishing, 2012) and Nihad Sirees’ The Silence and the Roar (London: Pushkin Press; New York: Other Press, 2013). He is currently writing an interpretive history of Syria in the twentieth century, to be published by Princeton University Press, and translating Fawwaz Haddad’s Solo Piano Music.

Samar Yazbek’s A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution (Haus Publishing, 2012) chronicles the first hundred days of the Syrian uprising from the perspective of an acclaimed Syrian journalist and novelist whose outspoken views and participation in anti-government protests made her a target of the Assad regime.

“An impassioned and harrowing memoir of the early revolt.”—New York Review of Books

Organized in conjunction with the Barnard Center for Translation Studies and Seven Stories Press