This was a really lovely catalogue to work on, with great photographs inside, and that amazing cover on the outside. Curiously, I translated various portions of text, written by South African and Austrian contributors, from English to German and German to English - things that didn't really seem to match -- and then the authors of the original texts emended and further elaborated on what they had written, and the final product wound up being, unusual in my case, all in German, with a final gloss and highlights being put on by the curator. I think we were both satisfied with the outcome, which emerged as a result not so much of a process of translation than -- transcreation.

TABLEAUX VIVANTS was an interesting experience for me as a translator. I was not overly familiar with the concept at the time, but once I'd done the catalogue, I couldn't stop seeing frozen images of "living statues" --- everywhere. I also remember getting a rush copy of Goethe's "Elective Affinities", desperately searching for a particular quote in English. I did find what I was looking for. But the one I came across that was sure to be a twist on the original was this: "There are few things worse by far // than a German girl with a guitar."


TRAUM & TRAUMA made perfect sense in German, as a title. I would have loved to go for DREAMS & DRAMAS, or some other, much freer and wilder thing in English, like TRICKS & TREATS, which would have fitted into the space just as well. But this was not to be. I had to remember I wasn't doing my own thing here, I was working for a client. And I was working for this client because miracles were expected of me as par for the course. ELASTIC TABOOS was the original title of the catalogue on contemporary Korean art and I seem to remember translating texts that had travelled some distance already from Korean to English to German before I got to have anything to do with them. Still, the final result looked pretty good.


Over the past 20 years, Gerald Matt, the director of Vienna's Kunsthalle, the city's premier place for modern and contemporary art, has spoken with a great many of the artists who presented their work there -- and I translated my fair share of these interviews, over three volumes. They can be found online, as well.




Those dastardly darts of ROBERT ADRIAN X seem to be aimed directly at poor ST. SEBASTIAN's heart, always providing new surprises. I translated smaller bits and often also sizeable chunks of many another KUNSTHALLE catalogue, most of which are now not just out of print, but not even listed anymore. However, take a look at the spread. www.kunsthallewien.at

Locks and keys were the order of the day with this catalogue for a specialised technical museum in Austria. My friend and colleague Nelson Wattie did one half, and I did the other. When the catalogue appeared in print, they gave a proper book launch celebration plus exhibition at the Vienna Museum of Technology, and I was flabbergasted by the great variety of shapes and sizes of all these artefacts, when I encountered them in real life – all these keys, locks, cabinets, treasure boxes and so on, which I had only ever seen in the computer. We worked on this catalogue for quite some time and at the end the author, Martina Pall, said, now we’d really earned ourselves a Ph.D. degree in “Schlüssel und Schlösser.” And so we had. It was a great experience.


Louise Bourgeois : aller-retour : Zeichnungen und Skulpturen / Kunsthalle Wien, Gerald Matt, Peter Weiermair (Hg.) ; [Übersetzung, Tom Appleton, Wolfgang Astelbauer] = Louise Bourgeois : aller-retour : drawings and sculptures / Kunsthalle Wien, Gerald Matt, Peter Weiermair (eds.) ; [translation, Tom Appleton, Wolfgang Astelbauer]. Nürnberg [Germany] : Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg ; [New York, NY : Distributed outside Europe, D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, Inc. c2005]. N6853.B6243 A4 2005
Farneti Cera, Deanna: Glanzstücke : Modeschmuck vom Jugendstil bis zur Gegenwart, [anlässlich der Ausstellung "Glanzstücke, Modeschmuck vom Jugendstil bis zur Gegenwart" im Museum Bellerive, Zürich (4.6. - 1.9.1991) und im Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Köln (9.10.1992 - 7.2.1993)]. hrsg. von. Dt. Bearb. Gerda Buxbaum. Mit Beitr. von Vivienne Westwood... Anh. von Rinaldo Albanesi ... [Texte: Rinaldo Albanesi ... übers.: Tom Appleton ...]
München : Prestel, 1991. 407 S. : überwiegend Ill., graph. Darst. , 29 cm Originalpappband, Originalumschlag, gebunden. ISBN: 379131176X (EAN: 9783791311760 / 978-3791311760) 119,00 EUR
angelegt am 05.01.2010 18:07:57
Kunsthalle Wien et al. (eds) Foreign objects – He Yunchan, Liu Ding, Wang Wei. Transl.: Tom Appleton et al. Verlag für moderne Kunst, Germany 2007, ISBN 978-3-939738-64-0
Oh, and here's another one that's worth checking out...


“In the flatness that results from its coordinates, the grid is the means of crowding out the dimensions of the real”
"In the spatial sense, the grid states the autonomy of the realm of art“
”Insofar as its order is that of pure relationship, the grid is a way of abrogating the claims of natural objects to have an order particular to themselves”

Photography, in this digital age, has expanded extraordinarily in the private sphere, also because a veritable flood of images determines the visual surface of our media space, into which the public space has long since been incorporated. www.horakova-maurer.com