We are delighted to be able to feature the work of this year’s White Rose Project student translators in a display on the High Street in Oxford.
In the first three years of the Project, students worked on translations of resistance writings by the White Rose, including their resistance pamphlets, and excerpts from their private letters and diaries. For this year of the Project, we wanted to explore processes of translation beyond the typical transfer from a source language to a target language, especially since this would open up the White Rose Project to students with no knowledge of German for the first time.
The creative translations included in the display illustrate the ways we mediate messages we find important across a variety of genres, forms, and media. Whilst we did not want to replace the work of the White Rose or diminish its historical significance, the project has always invited its participants to think about the differences between the original context of the group, their pamphlets, and our situation today, and these creative translations can be seen as reflections on that distance. Developed through a series of workshops and seminars from January to March 2022, these highly original re-workings of and responses to the group’s pamphlets, letters, diaries, identities, and legacies draw attention to the message of courage and resistance at the heart of the White Rose’s work, and provide examples of how we can express courage and resistance today. The creative translations are imaginative responses to, and interpretations of, real events and people as encountered in interviews and primary sources.
We are extremely grateful to St Edmund Hall for providing this opportunity to share the students’ work – and the history of the White Rose – in this unique way. We celebrated the end of this year’s project with a reception in the Old Dining Hall.
If you have seen the window display, we would be very grateful for your feedback: https://forms.office.com/r/jik3MnKKwn.
With thanks to Holly Langstaff for photography.
