Ellen Kanner and Annie Zeybekoglu published their book entitled I, Teresa de Lucena: Reflections on the Trial of a Conversa with Modern Memoirs Publishing in 2022.
I, Teresa de Lucena tells the story of a complex chapter of Spanish history through an intimate lens: the testimony of a woman who faced the Spanish Inquisition twice.
Here, Kanner, the translator and Zeybekoglu, the illustrator join forces with the protagonist: Teresa de Lucena’s trial testimony is translated in her own voice and accompanied by original drawings and the translator’s reflections. The result is an intimate portrait of one woman’s life in tumultuous times.
Ellen Kanner: I, Teresa de Lucena is a work of microhistory, a genre that puts the individual at the center of the narrative and then zooms out to create the larger context of her life and times. My intention was to tell Teresa’s story as accurately as possible based on the information revealed in her trial documents. I wanted to understand the details of her life—Where did she live? How old was she when her father fled? Who were the witnesses against her? And this required examining her life in minute detail—as if under a microscope. By contrast, most history is the story of events seen from afar—as if through a telescope. The far view makes it possible to count things, like the stars in the sky or the number of people condemned for heresy in a given city, but it doesn’t give you a sense of what a real person experienced who was living at the time.
Annie and Ellen will present their recent collaborative book project:
NEBA Show & Tell
Sunday, January 15, 2023 at 4pm
View the YouTube video HERE
Ellen shares, “Annie and I were classmates at Smith College, and when I arrived at her studio in 2018 with my translations and research, I already knew I greatly admired her design sense and book experience from other projects we had worked on together over the years. The true gift of working with Annie on I, Teresa de Lucena was the degree to which the design shaped the text and the text shaped the design. I think it’s fair to say our collaboration shows, and that ultimately we found a way to allow Teresa to speak for herself.”
Annie shared, “We set out to create a book to honor Teresa that was both beautiful and accessible. Ellen’s writing and my design and illustrations evolved together, in support of our decision to focus on the trial and to have Teresa speak in her own voice. I knew there had to be plenty of “air” to help readers decipher the complex narrative, and that we needed to create a format that would help readers know where they were in the trial. Early on we also decided to put Ellen’s research and reflections in sidebars instead of at the bottom as footnotes. Our design decisions, including where to put the sidebars and the illustrations, were meant to evoke an old manuscript.”
Read more from Modern Memoirs Publishing HERE
Purchase HERE from Levellers Press
11 x 9 .5″
$45