“I was the person who wrote, directed and acted in the only Home Economics opera ever written”
Structo talks to Margaret Atwood The author of more than 30 books, including novels, poetry and essay collections, and other non-fiction, Margaret Atwood doesn’t need a great deal of introduction. We talked in London the day after she gave the annual Sebald Lecture at the British Library. The title of her talk that night was ‘Atwood in Translationland’ and it was a fascinating—and frequently very funny—autobiographical journey through many different kinds of translation: from the reality of growing up between Anglophone Ottawa and Francophone Quebec, through to the problems translators face when confronted with her own writing. We picked up some of those threads for this interview. — Euan Monaghan structo: Were you invited over specifically for the Sebald Lecture? atwood:
No. I’m a unesco City of Literature Visiting Professor at Norwich. They have the Writers’ Centre there and they also have the writing programme at uea, so the two of them collaborated on this. James Lasdun is the other one this year. I think they’ve got two a year. Ali Smith has been one. It is basically a way of getting people to come and interact somewhat with the community, and we did it because we used to live in Blakeney. We wanted to revisit our old haunts and connect with our bird-watching pals who were in Cambridge: BirdLife International. We’re associated with that. structo: It’s good that you could come over and talk about translation, because that is something that we are particularly interested in it. atwood:
Are you? 77