Interpréter les crimes et les expériences de guerre : le TPIY et la poésie tchéchène
Interpreting War crimes and experiences: the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and poetry from Chechnya
Rencontre PROFIL 6 – Projet « Faire à plusieurs 2024 »
Le programme PROFIL (PROcès FILmés) s’inscrit dans la continuité de celui qui, au sein du LABEX « Les passés dans le présent », portait sur « Les procès filmés, une mémoire vive. De Nuremberg au procès du 13 novembre 2015 » (IHTP/Archives nationales). PROFIL est soutenu par la MSH-Mondes (« Faire à plusieurs 2024 »), l’INIST-CNRS, le CHAD (Centre d’Histoire et d’Anthropologie du Droit, EA 4417) et bénéficie d’un financement Recherche Paris Lumière Alliance (2024).
Le public est invité à VENIR AVEC UN SMARTPHONE ET DES ÉCOUTEURS.
Les échanges se tiendront en anglais.
11h-13h The Daughters, the interpreters and the family d’Eliane-Esther Bots – livre/pistes audio, DOC editions, 275 pages/45 minutes, 2026
Bâtiment Grappin, salle des thèses B15
Présentation du livre par Eliane-Esther Bots, expérience d’écoute des pistes audio, discussion autour de l’objet lui-même et du projet de transmission et de traduction des témoignages. Passer du film au livre, articuler les récits et les images, traduire les matériaux d’origine en anglais, faire intervenir les voix et le son en accompagnement d’un livre…
Book presentation: The Daughters, The Interpreters and The Family
The non-fiction artist’s book The Daughters, The Interpreters and The Family brings together transcriptions, poems, dreams, paintings, and drawings. These materials narrate conflict-related experiences and memories from three distinct perspectives: second-generation Dutch-Bosnian girls, interpreters working for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and a family who fled the war in Chechnya. The texts are based on transcriptions of extensive conversations and interviews conducted by filmmaker Eliane Bots as part of her film projects. In close collaboration with the interviewees, she reworked these transcriptions into the texts presented in the publication.
A dedicated section features English translations of Chechen poems, many of which were previously available only in Chechen or Russian. These translations are accompanied by notes and footnotes that contextualize the poems within the history of the Russo-Chechen Wars.
During this interactive presentation, participants are invited to experience two chapters of The Daughters, The Interpreters and The Family through the immersive audio track that accompanies the book. Following the collective listening session, Eliane Bots will reflect on the making of the book: working with transcriptions as a form of narrative justice, the challenges of translation, questions of agency, and the interplay between text, sound, and materiality. Drawing on her position as a filmmaker, she will also share how the book and its audio track reflect on the filmmaking process itself and on the encounters that shape it.
14h30 : Traduire en (contexte de) justice
Projection du film In flow of words d’Eliane-Esther Bots (22 minutes)
Bâtiment Weber, amphithéâtre
Échange entre Eliane-Esther Bots et Alma Imamovic-Ivanov, interprète auprès du TPIY qui témoigne de son expérience.
Questions/Discussion avec Ninon Maillard (Paris-Nanterre/CHAD), Naomi Toth (Paris-Nanterre/CREA)
Screening of In Flow of Words, followed by a talk with the director Eliane Esther Bots and former interpreter Alma Imamović.
In this second program element, we gather to watch In Flow of Words (22 minutes), a documentary by Eliane Esther Bots that follows three interpreters who worked at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, the Netherlands. The film has been screened extensively, including at major international film festivals and at the United Nations in Geneva. After the screening, interpreter Alma Imamović, one of the interpreters featured in the film, who spent more than ten years working for the tribunal, joins Eliane for an open conversation about the lesser-seen world of interpretation beyond the courtroom: the shifting spaces in which interpreters navigate between witnesses, accused persons, and legal teams; the emotional demands of working with testimonies marked by trauma and conflict; and what it means to interpret words that will become evidence.
The conversation unfolds into a round-table exchange together with Ninon Maillard and Naomi Toth. The round table invites the audience to participate actively.
16h : poèmes en guerre
Bâtiment Weber, amphithéâtre
Écoute de la piste audio réalisée par Eliane-Esther Bots pour le chapitre du livre consacré à la collecte, la traduction des poèmes tchétchènes
Lecture de poèmes par Kesira Adijewa, traductrice des poèmes collectés par son père ou écrits par sa mère.
Discussion avec Guillaume Peureux (Paris-Nanterre)
autour de la poésie en guerre.
Voice, poetry and translation: Chechen poetry with Kesira Adajewa
The final program element turns to the third chapter of the book The Daughters, The Interpreters and The Family. This chapter centers on the experiences of the Adajew family, who fled Chechnya during the wars of the 1990s. A central component of this chapter is the collective effort to translate the Chechen poetry collection Homelands Commandments, compiled by the Adajew family.
We will open this session with the audio piece It is a Voice by Eliane Esther Bots, recorded in the home of the Adajew family. The piece invites the audience to attune their listening before stepping into the shifting terrain of poetry, translation, and memory.
From there, the session unfolds as a meandering exploration of the poems: recitations, reflections, and contextual threads weave together to illuminate the complexities surrounding this body of work: the impossibility of certain translations, the presence of propaganda embedded in language, and the anonymity of authors whose names have been lost or silenced. Attention is also given to the poems written by Luiza Adajewa during the bombing of Grozny.
Kesira Adajewa, who translated the poems, joins the session, offering insight into the choices, constraints, and emotional resonances that shaped this translation process.
The event will conclude with a round-table conversation with a contribution by Guillaume Peureux, opening space to consider how poetry, translation, and historical violence intersect.
