Conversation Time is a collection of translations from letters written between 1938 and 1945 by refugees from and victims of the Nazi genocide. The selection focuses on greetings, formulae, writing about writing – the ordinary and repeated phrases that people used to express themselves to friends and family members from whom they were separated, not knowing when or if they would receive a reply. Stories of displacement and persecution, anxiety and longing are communicated indirectly, pressing through from behind the written repetitions and everyday language, visible to us through the letters’ dates. Conversation Time addresses the challenges of translating these letters now – how to convey their ordinariness, what it means to be a human translator in an age of machines, and how to let resonances between the letters, and between the letters and the present, sound out.
Rey Conquer is an essayist, novelist, poet and translator from Nottingham. They have a PhD in German literature and teach German and film at Queen Mary University of London. Their first book was an academic monograph on colour in modernist poetry. They are interested in questions of language and personhood in the context of human-non-human relations, the subject of a novel, How to Live Together, coming out with Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2027.
Orders will be dispatched Monday 9 June 2025.
Preview a sample of the book below:
