Translators | B

Bryar Bajalan is an MA student in Middle East Studies at the University of Exeter, where he studies changing depictions of eroticism in the literature of Mosul before and after the Islamic State’s occupation. To the Ends of the Earth, his short documentary about nineteenth-century Baghdadi poet Jamil al-Zahawi, will premiere at the Translating Poetries Symposium this month in London.

Benjamin Balint is the translator of Hagit Grossman’s Trembling of the City (2015) and the author of Kaf ka’s Last Trial, forthcoming from Norton. He lives in Jerusalem.

José Bañuelos-Montes is an associate professor of Spanish at Roanoke College. He has translated Jesús J. Barquet’s El libro del desterrado (momentos robados: 1983–1991) / The Emigrant’s Logbook (Stolen Moments: 1983–1991) and is currently translating the Brazilian poet Narlan Matos.

Polina Barskova is Assistant Professor of Russian literature at Hampshire College. She published her first poems at the age of nine and has authored seven books of poetry in Russian and two in English translation to date. Her scholarly publications include articles on Nabokov, the Bakhtin brothers, early Soviet film, and historical trauma. She is currently working on a project entitled "Post-Petersburg Besieged: Aesthetics of Urban Rereading."

Curtis Bauer is is the author of three poetry collections and translator of prose and poetry from Spanish. He is the recipient of the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and a Banff International Literary Translation Centre fellowship. His translation of Jeannette Clariond’s Image of Absence won the International Latino Book Award for the “Best Nonfiction Book Translation from Spanish to English.” He teaches creative writing and comparative literature at Texas Tech University.

Photo by Luisa Leme

Eric M. B. Becker is an award-winning literary translator and journalist and editor of Words Without Borders. In 2014 he earned a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for his translation of a short-story collection by Mia Couto. In 2016 he earned a Fulbright fellowship to translate Brazilian literature. He holds an MFA from Queens College–City University of New York and currently lives in Brazil.

Gabriella Bedetti studied translation at the University of Iowa and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her translations of Meschonnic’s essays and other writings have appeared in New Literary History, Critical Inquiry, and Diacritics. Meschonnic was a guest of the MLA at her roundtable with Ralph Cohen and Susan Stewart.

John Bengan’s translations of Elizabeth Joy Serrano-Quijano’s work have appeared or are forthcoming in Words Without Borders, Shenandoah, and LIT. He teaches at the University of the Philippines Mindanao. 

Julia Bloch is Assistant Professor at the Bard College MAT program in Delano, California, and an editor of the online poetics journal Jacket2. She grew up in northern California and Sydney, Australia, and received her PhD in English literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Her book Letters to Kelly Clarkson is forthcoming from Sidebrow Books; she has published poems recently in Aufgabe, P-Queue, and Peacock Online Review.

Don Boes is the author of Good Luck with That, Railroad Crossing, and The Eighth Continent, selected by A. R. Ammons for the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in the Louisville Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, CutBank, Zone 3, Southern Indiana Review, and Cincinnati Review.

David Brookshaw is an emeritus professor at the University of Bristol, UK. He has published widely in the field of Brazilian and lusophone postcolonial studies. His translations include, most recently, Mia Couto’s Confession of the Lioness and Pensativities and Other Interinventions: Selected Essays, both forthcoming in spring 2015. His translation of Couto’s “In Some Other Life I Was a Bird” appears on page 53.

Sarah Brownsberger’s poetry appears in Field, the Hudson Review, OnEarth, Poetry East, Salamander, and other journals. Her Icelandic-English translations include Sigfús Bjartmarsson’s bestiary, Raptorhood (Uppheimar, 2007); Harpa Árnadóttir’s artist’s diary, June (Crymogea, 2011); critical essays; and fiction and poetry for the unesco Reykjavík Literary City project.