Translator’s Note

September 2017

Translating Eli Eliahu’s Difficult Efficiency

By 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...
May 2017

Dynamic Dialogue: Translating with Gili Haimovich

By 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...
January 2017

Crossing Borders

By 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...
November 2016

Translating Little Black Boxes

By 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...
September 2016

Translating Deceptive Simplicity in Poetry

By 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...
May 2016

From Pasolini to the Pope

By 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...
March 2016

Translating Manga

By 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....
January 2016

A Book Pervaded by Voices

By 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...