Browsing a Copenhagen airport bookstore, a translator picks up a book. The journey between that impulse and his eventual translation of the memoir into English was both emotional and serendipito…
On Translation
- Statue of Ramos at Ponta Verde beach, Maceió, Brazil / Wikipedia In her new translation of Graciliano Ramos’s São Bernardo, forthcoming early next month from New Y…
- Ksenia Buksha / Courtesy of the author With apologies to Raymond Carver, what do we translate when we translate literature? What are we doing? And how do we do it? There…
- An emerging translator explores how translating The Lover helped her become “unstuck” at a time when she felt neither fully at home in English or in French. The Lover…
- Photo: Creawebpro / PixabayIn this short excerpt from the early pages of Marguerite Duras’s celebrated work of autofiction, The Lover, Duras looks back to her crossing o…
- Born in Yangzhou and currently living in Beijing, Zhu Zhu is the author of numerous books of poetry, essays, and art criticism. The Wild Great Wall, recently released by Phoneme…
- Raboni in the 1990s / Photo by Carla Cerati / Courtesy of giovanniraboni.itIn memory of Giovanni Raboni & Vinio Rossi 1Some thirty-five years ago,…
- Non-Oui is a biographical novel that tells the story of a woman from Split, Croatia. In her youth, Grandma Nedjeljka, or Non-Oui, as she was called (a literal French translation of the syllables o…
- Translating poetry is impossible in the sense that prose works can be translated (not to speak of the translation of nonliterary texts). But re-creating poetry in a different language is always possib…
- Looking back on 2017, it’s easy to declare the year a success for literary translation, which continued to thrive and move in exciting new directions. Of note, Emily Wilson translated The…
- Top right: Ben Faccini / Courtesy of English PEN. Bottom right: Kelsey MadsenBen Faccini is a novelist, writer, and translator based in London. He was born in England and brought up in France and Ital…
- Statue of Erasmus near the Collegium Trilingue in Louvain / Photo by Nick ThompsonDesiderius Erasmus (1466?–1536) made big books from little things. A literary lapidary, he compiled proverbs, anecdote…
- This poster was published in a special issue of Rocinante in 1971. The entire issue was dedicated to Valdivia on the second anniversary of her death.Click here to read five poems by Rita…
- Ekin Oklap discusses her personal journey to becoming a translator and provides some insight into her experiences with translating her current project, Orhan Pamuk’s The Red-Haired W…
- Photo by Jonathan ArmstrongTranslator Allison Markin Powell discusses her most recent project, The Nakano Thrift Shop, and provides some insight into her approach to the…
- moomin goat, “Goat Bells,” April 9, 2007Click here to read Sneeden’s translations of four of Giannisi’s poems. Phoebe Giannisi is one of Greece’s foremost contemporary poets and…
- The only task FitzGerald finished and published in his lifetime was his marvelous rendering of the Rubaiyat of the Persian poet Omar Khayyam, with whom he felt a curiously close affinity across a…
- Mathias Énard’s Compass (New Directions, 2017) is not only a love letter to the field of orientalism but, more broadly, to the power of the written word itself, especially in translatio…
- The dog days of summer are upon us, and there’s no better way to pass through the longer days than curling up with a book in the shade. If you’re looking for some words to keep you company…
- Robert Creeley (1972) / Photo by Elsa DorfmanIn April, following the death of Yevgeny Yevtushenko, I was digging through a wicker chest with old papers, looking at a colleague’s request for a fe…
- Six years after its initial French publication, Luis de Miranda’s novella Who Killed the Poet? (Qui a tué le poète?) is being translated into English and multiple other lan…
- Starling murmuration. Photo by Airwolfhound/FlickrFive years after meeting at the Literary Translation Summer School run by the British Centre for Literary Translation, translators Morgan Giles, R…
- Drawing by Lea Goldberg / Courtesy of Tuvia RuebnerLea Goldberg (1911–1970), preeminent, versatile, and prolific writer of modern Hebrew letters, produced in her lifetime poetry that was charact…
- Click here to read three poems by Joanna Pollakówna, never before translated into English.Joanna Pollakówna / Courtesy of Alice-Catherine CarlsJoanna Pollakówna (1939–2002) authored poe…
- Eybers’s poem “Taalles” (Language Lesson) on the wall of the Anne Frank School in Leiden / Source: WikimediaWhether by personal predilection or because of powers beyond their control, poets are s…