Translating History

A Conversation with Isabel Fargo Cole

- Andrea Bryant

Isabel Fargo Cole grew up in New York City, received a BA from the University of Chicago in 1995, and has lived in Berlin ever since as a writer and translator. Her translation of Wolfgang Hilbig’s Old Rendering Plant received the Kurt and Helen Wolff Prize in 2018, and her other translations of work by Wolfgang Hilbig and Franz Fühmann have been nominated for several awards. Since 2005 she has published short fiction and essays in German. Her second novel, Das Gift der Biene, was published by Edition Nautilus in 2019 and selected for the 2019 LiteraTour Nord, the 2020 Festival Neue Literatur in New York, and the 2020 Literaturlenz in Chicago.

From 2006 to 2016, Cole co-edited no man’s land, an online magazine for new German literature in English. In 2013 she was a co-organizer of the initiative “Writers Against Mass Surveillance.” In this conversation, she and Andrea Bryant consider the roles that historical context, location, and translation play in her writing.

Andrea Bryant: Our last interview concluded with a question about your involvement with Writers Against Mass Surveillance, an initiative that you co-started. I noticed that your novella, Ungesichertes Gelände, revolves around political activists. Would you say that political activism plays an equally important role for your characters in Das Gift der Biene?