Photo by Enrique / stock.adobe.comIn her ongoing column of untranslatable words, Veronica Esposito considers the Japanese art of wabi-sabi and how its iconic image of an aged, cracked bow…
On Translation
October 19, 2023
September 5, 2023In her column Untranslatable, Veronica Esposito considers why various words are so difficult to translate. Here, she looks at the famously difficult Tshilubà word ilunga and wonders what…
April 6, 2021Browsing 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 serendipitou…
April 27, 2020Statue 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 York Review Boo…
December 4, 2018Ksenia 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 ar…
August 21, 2018An 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…
August 21, 2018Photo: Creawebpro / Pixabay In this short excerpt from the early pages of Marguerite Duras’s celebrated work of autofiction, The Lover, Duras looks back to her crossing…
July 3, 2018Born 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…
May 22, 2018Raboni in the 1990s / Photo by Carla Cerati / Courtesy of giovanniraboni.it In memory of Giovanni Raboni & Vinio Rossi 1 Some thirty-five years ago,…
May 8, 2018Non-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…
December 19, 2017Translating 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 possi…
December 12, 2017Looking 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 Odyssey…
November 14, 2017Top right: Ben Faccini / Courtesy of English PEN. Bottom right: Kelsey Madsen Ben Faccini is a novelist, writer, and translator based in London. He was born in England and brought up in France and It…
October 31, 2017Statue of Erasmus near the Collegium Trilingue in Louvain / Photo by Nick Thompson Desiderius Erasmus (1466?–1536) made big books from little things. A literary lapidary, he compiled proverbs, anecdo…
October 3, 2017This 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 Rit…
August 29, 2017Ekin 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…
August 22, 2017Photo by Jonathan Armstrong Translator Allison Markin Powell discusses her most recent project, The Nakano Thrift Shop, and provides some insight into her approach to t…
August 15, 2017moomin goat, “Goat Bells,” April 9, 2007 Click here to read Sneeden’s translations of four of Giannisi’s poems. Phoebe Giannisi is one of Greece’s foremost contemporary poets and i…
July 25, 2017The 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…
July 18, 2017Mathias 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 translation. I…
July 11, 2017The 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, there are…
June 27, 2017Robert Creeley (1972) / Photo by Elsa Dorfman In 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 few le…
June 20, 2017Six 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 language…
June 6, 2017Starling murmuration. Photo by Airwolfhound/Flickr Five years after meeting at the Literary Translation Summer School run by the British Centre for Literary Translation, translators Morgan Giles,…
May 30, 2017Drawing by Lea Goldberg / Courtesy of Tuvia Ruebner Lea Goldberg (1911–1970), preeminent, versatile, and prolific writer of modern Hebrew letters, produced in her lifetime poetry that was characteriz…
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