Translator’s Note

Spring 2019

Lather, Rinse, Rewrite: On Translating Eugene Vodolazkin

By 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...
Winter 2019

Look to the Law: On Translating the Poems of Ennio Moltedo

By 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 travel-w...
November 2018

Translating Ashur Etwebi’s Handshake with the World

By 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...
September 2018

On Wrungness in Translation

By 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...
July 2018

Negotiating Four Generations of Voices (with a Little Help from Google Earth)

By 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...
May 2018

Unhomed

By 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...
March 2018

The Person and the Personal

By 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...
January 2018

See How She Creates Light: On Translating Liu Xia

By 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...
November 2017

Sheltering Words: Collaboratively Translating Montasser Al-Qaffash

By 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...
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...