17. Conversation Time (2025) – Rey Conquer

Paperback publication, translations of archive letters with translator essay. Text excerpts installed on gallery windows, vinyl on glass.

Conversation Time is a collection of translations from letters
held in the Holocaust Centre North Archive, written between
1938-1945 by refugees from and victims of Nazi persecution. 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.

An afterword relates the experience of the residency and the
challenges of translating these letters in the present day – how to
convey the ordinariness, what it means to be a human translator in an
age of machines, and how to let the resonances between the letters,
and between the letters and present day experiences, sound out.

With thanks to Elisabeth Bernheim, Michelle Green, Martin Hyman,
Joanna Leser, D. Rivlin, Trude Silman and the Anysz, Hartland, Kubie,
Leser, Schatzberger and Vernon families. Courtesy of Holocaust
Centre North Archive.