Pilar Estelrich i Arce

Universitat Pompeu Fabra

pilar.estelrich@upf.edu

Pilar Estelrich i Arce (Palma de Mallorca, 1952) is a professor emeritus (previously, an associate professor) at the Faculty of Translation and Interpretation of Universitat Pompeu Fabra, where she teaches general and literary translation from German, and description and comparison of translations. Previously, she had been an associate professor of German philology at the Faculty of Philology of Universitat de Barcelona, from where she graduated (1974) and earned her PhD (1990) with a thesis on Joseph Roth that received a special doctoral award. She taught German as a foreign language and German literature at that university for many years. She has held several positions, such as dean of the Faculty of Translation and Interpretation (1999-2004) of Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

In accordance with her interests in teaching and research, she has translated, mainly from German into Catalan, works by Ingeborg Bachman, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Julia Franck, Arno Geiger, Günter Grass, Hermann Hesse, Joachim Israel, Elfriede Jelinek, Franz Kafka, Wolfang Koeppen, Claudio Magris, Christoph Ribbat, David Safier, Uwe Tellkamp, Iliia Trojanow, and Timur Vermes, among others.

She has also translated children’s literature – especially, Cornelia Funke, Wolfgang Ecke and Michael Ende –, as well as nonliterary works by Hugo Preuss, Karl Renner and Otto Bauer at the request of the Institut d’Estudis Autonòmics.

She has participated in several translators’ meetings with their authors, especially the seminars organized by Günter Grass and his reader Helmut Frielinghaus to translate Grass’s prose (My Century, 1999; Peeling the Onion, 2006; The Box, 2009) and to discuss the (un)translatability of the latest narrative work, Grimms Wörter (2011), as well as about the lyrical poetry of Grass, with Susanne Höbel and Dieter Stolz (2013).

She has also taken part in meetings with authors Julia Franck and Uwe Tellkamp at the Europäisches Übersetzer-Kollegium (European College of Translators) in Straelen (Germany). For health reasons, she was unable to attend the meeting with Timur Vermes in this same institution.