After the success of last year’s White Rose Translation Project we are running a similar project this year, focusing on the White Rose members’ letters and diaries. We issued a call for translators in October 2019, inviting students at the University of Oxford to apply. Applicants were asked to submit a short statement outlining why they would like to be involved, and to translate an extract from one of Hans Scholl’s letters home from the front in 1942:
In 14 Tagen werde ich die Heimreise antreten. Ich habe eingesehen, dass nichts wichtiger ist, als jetzt zu Euch zu fahren. Von unserem Graben zu den Russen sind es 80m. Trotzdem lebt man hier mehr im Frieden als je. Vorausgesetzt, dass man sich aus dem Lärm nichts macht.
We had a number of very strong submissions and eighteen students from thirteen colleges were selected to participate: Beth Molyneaux, Greta Simpson, Holly Abrahamson, Benjy Fortna, Lucy Buxton, James Cutting, Luke Cooper, Sibylle Bandilla, Lydia Ludlow, Sam Davis, Amira Ramdani, Gerda Krivaite, Genevieve Jeffcoate, Millie Farley, Thomas Lyne, Jonah Cowen, Rachel Herring, and Alice Hopkinson-Woolley. The students will also be joined by one of the translators on last year’s project, Finn Provan. We were very sorry not to be able to give a place to everyone who applied, but there were almost three times as many applications as places this year.
The students will be meeting for their first session later this term. They will be discussing the history of the White Rose, translation theory, and the aims of their translation. They will work on the texts both independently and as part of the group over the course of Michaelmas and Hilary terms.
