Press Release - Berlin, 10.12.2021

Nord Stream 3 - A project of Forum Mare Balticum e.V.

The Baltic Sea Culture Pipeline “Nord Stream 3” has reached its preliminary goal: With more than 60 new translations, primarily essays, the virtual Baltic Sea library has experienced one of its most comprehensive expansions within a year and now includes an impressive number of 350 authors – writers and translators. 

The project’s focus was in particular on the border regions and peripheries of the Baltic Sea region: Lapland, Karelia, Ingermanland, Latgale, Kaliningrad. With the selection of the newly added texts, we explore the question of whether a common identity is conceivable in the Baltic Sea region and thus enter into dialogue between our diverse languages via translation. Among others, the following essays have been newly translated into German: 

Brücken ins Nirgendwo? Identität der Bewohner des Kaliningrader Gebiets im 21. Jahrhundert by Ilya Dementiev
Ebenen und Kanten: eine höchstpersönliche Sicht auf das historische Lettgallen by Sergey Moreino
In Lappland (Lotten von Düben) by Eva Dahlman
Tucholsky und die Ostsee by Klaus Leesch
Zu Besuch bei Jurij Dmitrijew by Sergey Lebedev

A highlight of the project was a reading on 30 September 2021, the International Translators’ Day. Mareen Bruns, Elna Lindgens and Franziska Zwerg read texts from the Baltic Sea Library in the Museum of Unheard (of) Things in Berlin-Schöneberg – with a live transmission to the street. 

On the last few metres of the pipeline, thanks to additional support from the EU's "i-Portunus" mobility fund, we were also able to make recordings of the poem “Baltics” by Literature Nobel Prize winner Tomas Tranströmer and bring it into a new "audios" section. His poem "Baltics" – which is something of an anthem to the Baltic Sea Library – can now be listened to in Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Lithuanian and Sami. It is read either by the translators themselves or by actors. 

Our thanks go to the German Translator's Fund, which made the Nord Stream 3 project possible with an amount of almost 60,000 €, within the framework of the Neustart Kultur Programme of the German Federal Government / the Commissioner for Culture and the Media – as well as to all the translators involved.

The Baltic Sea Library is a virtual library with an open-source character. It currently contains representative excerpts from novels and stories, as well as poems and essays, in short: literary texts in 14 languages. In addition to the nine official languages of the Baltic Sea countries, there are also texts in Sami, Norwegian and Icelandic as well as in Latin and Old English. We see ourselves as a model project for the digital mediation of a literary region via translation, since the Baltic Sea region as a communal-dialogical narrative can only be grasped in all its linguistic diversity.

Contact:
Klaus-Jürgen Liedtke, Forum Mare Balticum e.V. (Artistic Director): +49 (0) 30 692 77 35
Nora Sefa (Public Relations): nora.sefa@googlemail.com