Translation
Daniella Shreir works as a translator of literature, subtitles, gallery texts and academic essays.
Selected projects:
With an Introduction by Eileen Myles and an Afterword by Frances Morgan
PEN Translates 2018 award-winner
“And there were other girls who were odd ones too and that was how it was. We loved each other and that was that. I was 18 in May 1968 and it seemed as though my style was becoming popular and that everything was going back to normal, if I dare use the word because I really don’t like the word normal. I prefer the word abnormal but only just, because in the word abnormal you can still hear the word normal and that’s a word I really don't want to hear.”
The filmmaker Chantal Akerman's mother was dying. She flew back from New York to Brussels to care for her, and between dressing her, feeding her and putting her to bed, she wrote. She wrote about her childhood, the escape her mother made from Auschwitz but didn't talk about, the difficulty of loving her girlfriend, C., her fear of what she would do when her mother did die. Among these imperfectly perfect fragments of writing about her life, she placed stills from her films. My Mother Laughs is both the distillation of the themes Akerman pursued throughout her creative life, and a version of the simplest and most complicated love story of all: that between a mother and a daughter.
Press:
“Shreir’s approach not only seems a faithful rendering of Akerman’s candid style, but also feels like a legitimate response to important sides of Akerman’s character that emerge through the text” – Asymptote
“The achievement of [Shreir’s] translation creates anew in English a work pulsing with Akerman’s voice” – LARB
Selected commissions
‘Silent Voices: The “Arabs” and Gay Liberation in France’ by Antoine Idier [Essay to appear in Queer Print in Europe, Bloomsbury Press 2021]
Adrien Vescovi by Francois Piron [Gallery text, June 2020]
Transcription and translation of audiovisual material in which the actress Maria Schneider appears [Film research for filmmaker Elisabeth Subrin. January – September, 2020]
Portrait of a Lady on Fire by Celine Sciamma [Script translation, commissioned by NEON distribution, March 2020]
‘EXCLUDE ME IN - INCLUDE ME OUT’ by Émilie Notéris [From This Is My Body, My Body Is Your Body, My Body Is The Body of the Word, ed. Lilou Vidal, Paraguay, March 2020]
Le Camion + Les Mains Négatives by Marguerite Duras [Subtitles for screening at Regent Street Cinema, London, July 2019]
Textes queer, traductions queer at Paris Ass Book Fair [Panel discussion at the Palais de Tokyo,April 2019]