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PROFILES Where art & design meets fiction WORDS D
es Traynor Sarah Sturzel co-edits Profiles, a Dublinbased literary and visual arts journal focusing on character studies and portraiture, with her friend Claire Healy. Another positive initiative to have been born out of pandemic lockdown, and published annually, the magazine is now accepting submissions for Issue IV. Having received 1,000+ submissions for last year’s third issue, they are hoping to expand their team. Funded initially by Dublin City Council and UNESCO City of Literature, the journal offers artists fees, and has managed to break even. In his recent Irish Times round up of the thriving Irish literary magazine scene, novelist Kevin Power wrote that ‘On the evidence of issue iii, Profiles is the real deal: the art and design are spectacular, and the fiction is unusually good,’ a recommendation which indicates you should be paying attention. When Totally Dublin met up with her recently, on a sunny Spring afternoon, we discussed Sarah’s background in French and English literature, her Masters in literary translation from Trinity, and her interest in translation as a form of (re)writing. She emphasised the journal’s unique interdisciplinary approach, combining writing and visual arts, and their efforts to support emerging talent through commissioning collaborative work between writers and visual artists. So tell me about your background? I studied French and English literature in Trinity, as did my co-editor, Claire, there’s two of us that run the show, and she did the exact same course, so that was how we met. And then I went on to do a Masters in literary translation after that. I’m not a writer myself, but I’m very interested in translation as a form of writing, and I really enjoy working with people’s original texts, making them my own. But then, of course, there’s always a loyalty to the original text. So I felt an editorial position kind of gave you that extra bit of freedom to improve the text, where you see room for improvement. For example, there’s Alice Lyons, an experimental writer based in Sligo, I translated her novel Oona, which is written entirely without the letter o, which when translating that into a new language, keeping that constraint in place is a whole other challenge. How did you set up Profiles, how did you go about looking for funding? We got Dublin City Council’s project award for the first time for the forthcoming issue. Prior to that, we were getting support from them and UNESCO City of Literature. It’s a very small grant, we’re stretching it as far as we can. 38