Translator’s Note

Translating Toshiko Hirata’s Ars Poetica

By Eric E. Hyett, Spencer Thurlow

Autumn 2020
Eric E. Hyett, Spencer Thurlow

Photo: Andre Benz / Unsplash IN REAL LIFE, TOSHIKO HIRATA (b. 1955) is a uniquely kind, warm, and outgoing person, famous for her sense of humor as one of Japan’s best-known l...
The Tragic, the Absurd in Sadaa al-Daas’s “Zoo Syndrome”

By Omar Qaqish

Summer 2020
Omar Qaqish

Photo: Nick Fewings / Unsplash ONE MORNING, WHILE READING his newspaper, the narrator of Sadaa al-Daas’s “Zoo Syndrome” looks up to find his wife changed into a prancing doe....
Hauntings

By John Bengan

Spring 2020
John Bengan

Photo: Yuris Alhumaydy / Unsplash ELIZABETH JOY SERRANO-QUIJANO’S stories are set in Matanao, Davao del Sur, a town in southeastern Philippines. She is part Blaan, an indigeno...
Translation as Masquerade

By Cecilia Weddell

Winter 2020
Cecilia Weddell

Photo: Hayley Mechelle / Flickr WHEN THE NARRATOR of Bibiana Camacho’s “The Other Woman” compares the face reflected in her mirror with the face on her work ID, she muses, “Ye...
Translating Women’s Stories out of Oblivion

By Aaron Robertson

Autumn 2019
Aaron Robertson

Photo: Samuel Zeller / Unsplash IN HIS WORK on color symbolism in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Florian Bast describes one of the typical reactions to trauma in the novel as “a...
Translating Identity

By Jennifer Lobaugh

Summer 2019
Jennifer Lobaugh

Aleksandra Tsibulia. A PROFESSOR ONCE COMPLAINED to me that American students struggle to learn Russian because English, as a language, is too selfish. “You’re obsessed with the...
Lather, Rinse, Rewrite: On Translating Eugene Vodolazkin

By Lisa C. Hayden

Spring 2019
Lisa C. Hayden

LITERARY TRANSLATION IS A mysterious form of writing that I love for its mandate: rewrite a Russian book in English so it represents the author’s Russian text. There’s no plotting. No...
Look to the Law: On Translating the Poems of Ennio Moltedo

By Marguerite Feitlowitz

Winter 2019
Marguerite Feitlowitz

Librería Ulíses in Santiago de Chile. Photo courtesy of Librería Ulíses. I ARRIVED IN Santiago de Chile on a blisteringly hot Sunday afternoon in early December 2016, too trave...
Translating Ashur Etwebi’s Handshake with the World

By James Byrne

November 2018
James Byrne

Svalbard Photo: mariusz kluzniak/Flickr A YEAR AGO I TOOK A TRIP to Svalbard, the nearest inhabited archipelago to the North Pole. I was there to work with the Libyan poet Ashur Etwe...
On Wrungness in Translation

By Katrine Øgaard Jensen

September 2018
Katrine Øgaard Jensen

Photo: Eric Kilby/Flickr Ursula Andkjær Olsen is one of Denmark’s most important contemporary poets. A poets’ poet and a critics’ darling, she won the prestigious literary award Montanaprisen in 2013...
Negotiating Four Generations of Voices (with a Little Help from Google Earth)

By Lynn E. Palermo

July 2018
Lynn E. Palermo

Photo: Google Earth The Herring and the Saxophone (Le Hareng et le saxophone), a hybrid work by Sylvie Weil, is listed as a novel, yet just as in Tim O’Brien’s The Thin...
Unhomed

By Edward Gauvin

May 2018
Edward Gauvin

A house in Iceland with a turf roof. photo: jonathan andreo/unsplash W hen asked to contribute to a speculative fiction folio, I noticed only afterward I’d picked two tales that revolve around house...
The Person and the Personal

By Matthew Landrum

March 2018
Matthew Landrum

photo: sweet ice cream photography/unsplash Who is Aleksandur Kristiansen? The question was simple on the face of it. My co-translator had sent me a biopic note explaining that he was a Faroese poet...
See How She Creates Light: On Translating Liu Xia

By Ming Di

January 2018
Ming Di

I was struck by one of the poems Liu Xia released a few days before her husband, Liu Xiaobo, died of cancer as a political prisoner in China. One line in particular hovered in my dreams until one morn...
Sheltering Words: Collaboratively Translating Montasser Al-Qaffash

By Gretchen McCullough, Mohamed Metwalli

November 2017
Gretchen McCullough, Mohamed Metwalli

One of the reasons I love living in Cairo is the fact that everyone spins yarns: the porter, the maid, the taxi driver. No one has the corner on stories—many of these stories rely on rumor, humor, an...
Translating Eli Eliahu’s Difficult Efficiency

By Kevin Haworth

September 2017
Kevin Haworth

Photo: Kelly Deluded “I like simple writing, straightforward and uncomplicated, and I try to write like that,” Eli Eliahu said, upon receiving Israel’s Matanel Prize in 2013. His work is characterize...
Dynamic Dialogue: Translating with Gili Haimovich

By Dara Barnat

May 2017
Dara Barnat

Photo: Annabelle Shemer The creative collaboration between myself and Israeli poet Gili Haimovich began around 2009. The first poem of hers to be published in English translation was “Evolution,” wit...
Crossing Borders

By Julie Ann Ward

January 2017
Julie Ann Ward

Migrants heading north through Mexico on La Bestia (“The Beast”). Nadia Villafuerte’s collection of short stories Barcos en Houston (Ships in Houston) portrays a wide variety of voices inhab...
Translating Little Black Boxes

By Kerri Pierce

November 2016
Kerri Pierce

Gunnhild Øyehaug’s “Dreamwriter,” among other things, is a story about layers, layering, the lattice of the finished work and the trickle down that is life—that wonderful image, the tørrfiskstati...
Translating Deceptive Simplicity in Poetry

By Paul Scott Derrick

September 2016
Paul Scott Derrick

Ana Blandiana Ana Blandiana is a poet of rich formal resources. Since her first book, First-Person Plural (1964), she has written in a variety of forms ranging from sonnets to traditionally...
From Pasolini to the Pope

By Oonagh Stransky

May 2016
Oonagh Stransky

When Random House contacted me about translating a book by Pope Francis, I did a double take. I had worked for the publisher in the past on fiction but never on nonfiction. How on earth did my name c...
Translating Manga

By Frederik L. Schodt

March 2016
Frederik L. Schodt

Schodt with manga legend Osamu Tezuka in 1981. I’ve translated manga off and on for nearly forty years, and it is hard to imagine any translation process that has changed more radically in that time....
A Book Pervaded by Voices

By Isabel Fargo Cole

January 2016
Isabel Fargo Cole

In Among the Bieresch, the young narrator, Hans, is sent to his father’s ancestral village in the easternmost province of the “Empire” (a surreal postwar Austria). His uncle...