Di Brandt Publishes Translation of Play by Jenny Erpenbeck

Fri. Dec. 7, 2018

Di Brandt's translation of celebrated Berlin-based playwright and author Jenny Erpenbeck's one-act play Katzen haben sieben Leben was recently published in New York as Cats Have Nine Lives in PAJ:  A Journal of Performance and Art, along with a brief Introduction to the author and her work. Hopefully the English publication of Cats Have Nine Lives will stimulate more North American productions of this stylish, experimental, challenging two-hander, which ran for three years at the Deutsche Theater in Berlin, and received its Canadian premiere at the University of Windsor, Ontario.  Jenny Erpenbeck and Di Brandt met at an international artists' retreat in upstate New York, and "traded" texts to translate.  Erpenbeck has been translating Brandt's questions i asked my mother into German - an interesting experience for Di, who grew up speaking Plautdietsch and German, but speaks and writes mainly in English now.