The Queen's College Record 2020

Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Other planned visits included archival
work at the Yale Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, a translation workshop
to be delivered at the University of Central Florida, and an invited lecture at Princeton.
As alarming news was coming from China and my home country, Italy, I came to
terms with the fact that my project was no longer a theoretical matter; it was, in fact,
an articulation of the global crisis we were living through. Coronavirus disease had
become the illness we were asked to translate.
Articles
Marta giving the introduction at the Translating Illness Inaugural Lecture
Translating COVID-19: Emergency Response
I activated Translating COVID-19 (www.queens.ox.ac.uk/translating-covid-19) as an
emergency response to the pandemic. I designed and hosted a series of five video
conversations with world-leading experts in translation studies and epidemiology,
with the aim of discussing the translational implications of coronavirus disease.
The episodes – which attracted almost 3,000 views in five months – touched upon
questions of race, conspiracy and (lack of) medical evidence connected with the
current health, ethnic, and environmental crises. In the first episode, Nicola Gardini,
Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at Oxford, invited us to reflect on the
language we use and the metaphors we resort to in order to capture the ineffability
of illness. The second episode in the series featured Charles Forsdick, James Barrow
Professor of French at the University of Liverpool and AHRC Theme Leadership Fellow
for Translating Cultures. Professor Forsdick highlighted the ways in which translation
creates connections that can protect us from isolation both on public and private
levels. He explored the many meanings which the experience of confinement has
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