Exercises in Translation: Swiss-British Cultural Interchange

From 2002 to 2004 Presence Suisse funded a ‘Swiss Fellow in the UK’ programme in five universities in the four regions of the United Kingdom which enabled a Swiss writer or academic to be based in one university and to undertake short visits to the other four. Three Swiss Fellows, each writing in one of the official languages of Switzerland, took part. This book marks the success of the programme and the events which it generated by assembling contributions from participants and organisers and from others involved in Swiss studies in the United Kingdom. The essays deal with aspects of perception and mediation which occur in the interchange between two countries. There are views of each country acquired by citizens of the other through travel or short sojourns; comments on the effect on their writing from writers who have adopted the other country by living there permanently; and accounts of interchange through critical appreciation, translation and cultural borrowing.