Archives and Special Collections recently hosted María Gracia Torres Díaz, the latest winner of the John Ditsky Memorial John Steinbeck Scholarship, this June. Ms. Díaz visited us from the University of Málaga, Spain, where she is a Professor in the Department of Translation and Interpretation. While she was in residence for five weeks in May-June, María researched our extensive collection of Steinbeck materials, with a focus on his World War II period, assisted by archivist Lindsey Vesperry, and graduate assistant Samantha Politinsky. Her research proposal was titled Exploring John Steinbeck’s Cross-Cultural Communication Challenges as a Journalist and its Implications for Contemporary Interpreters.

Having done research last year at IU Bloomington, Prof. Torres- Díaz was enchanted by the Indiana landscape, and returned this year to the campus of Ball State, which she says is equally beautiful. At IU she focused on their collection of Tokyo War Crimes Trials material, and she hoped to continue in that vein here in Muncie, looking at material from when John Steinbeck was a correspondent during the Nuremberg Trials. The trials were one of the first times in history that “simultaneous interpretation” was used; communicating between different nationalities in different languages at the same time.  Prof. Díaz noted,

“Whenever you have a conflict of people from different areas, you have interpreters. I try to get to the hidden, invisible ones who did the translating. Sometimes I find them, and sometimes I don’t.”

We’re happy to say that she found something hidden here in the Steinbeck Collection which will definitively reimagine his legacy. Her full findings will be published in the near future.