Bridging Languages, Building Careers: Susan Harris Visits BU
On October 9th and 10th, our MFA program in Literary Translation had the privilege of hosting Susan Harris, Editorial Director of Words Without Borders, for two stimulating workshops on the practical aspects of translation. Harris, whose experience in translation publishing includes building Northwestern University Press’s celebrated list of East European literature before joining Words Without Borders in 2003, brought great practical insights and genuine warmth to her discussions with our students.
From the moment she arrived, Harris’s big smile and approachability set the tone. She led us in a fascinating and friendly conversation about the real work of publishing, the daily rhythms of an editorial office, and the informal networks that make the literary translation world turn.
The Art of Pitching Your Translation
The first workshop addressed what many emerging translators find most daunting: getting your work into the hands of editors who receive hundreds of submissions. Harris began by sharing the origin story of Words Without Borders, which was conceived in the late 1990s by Alane Salierno Mason, an editor at W. W. Norton, as a way to help monolingual editors access world literature. Today, the magazine publishes four days a week, having featured thousands of pieces from 141 countries in 133 languages, all freely accessible to anyone with an internet connection.
But how does one break into this literary ecosystem? “The key,” Harris said, “ is to give editors reasons to say yes.” This means crafting cover letters that get the editor’s attention by articulating not just the literary value of a work but why the piece matters now and why it is a good fit for the publisher or magazine to which you are pitching it. For translators proposing retranslations, Harris emphasized the need to justify the endeavor clearly. Is the language being updated? Are there historical inaccuracies to correct? Does your translation capture tonal dimensions the earlier version missed?
Harris encouraged participants to think strategically about placement, drawing comparisons between the work you plan to translate and well known literary works (“the next Harry Potter!” or “a Japanese Edgar Allan Poe!!”) to help editors quickly grasp a work’s positioning. She also spoke about the importance of networking, particularly at conferences like the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA), which she described as welcoming translators from diverse linguistic backgrounds in an atmosphere that prizes collegiality over competition.
The practical details mattered too, including securing rights before submission. With Words Without Borders’ current submissions window deadline of December 15th approaching, students left with concrete knowledge about how to present their translations professionally—and a deeper understanding of what editors need to see.
Editing Translations
The morning we met for the second workshop happened to coincide with the announcement that the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai had just won the Nobel Prize. Harris had been up early reading the first reactions, and shared her pride in the fact that Words Without Borders had published him back in 2009. He is the tenth Nobel Laureate whose work the magazine has introduced, and she recommended his novels Satantango and Seiobo There Below.
Then came the real work, on editing translations. Harris walked participants through a particularly challenging project: a story from Untold, a UK NGO that conducts writing workshops for women in underprivileged areas. The piece, set in a fishing village, went through seven rounds of revision as the editorial team worked to preserve the connection to the original while ensuring English-language readers could fully inhabit the world being described in the story.
This is where the conversation became philosophically rich as we discussed how to balance cultural specificity with accessibility. Harris explained how editorial practices at Words Without Borders have evolved over the years towards greater respect for cultural difference, including their policy of not using italics for foreign terms. As Harris explained, italicization can function as “linguistic gatekeeping,” distinguishing what “belongs” in English from what doesn’t. The goal is to avoid “othering” the text, while maintaining its distinctive cultural markers.
Students examined specific examples from the text, including the challenge of translating local fishing terminology that required multiple iterations, and choosing between terms that resonate differently in American English versus English as it is used in South Asia. We also discussed the particular challenge of capturing works with singular styles, such as Krasznahorkai, whose work famously uses sentences that can go on for hundreds of pages and cannot be chopped into generic “good English.”
At Words Without Borders, editors review each other’s work, querying unfamiliar terms, researching contexts, always asking: Does this serve both the author’s vision and the reader’s understanding? As Harris knows from decades of experience, translation editing involves a difficult balancing act between fidelity to the source text and to readers encountering another culture through English.
Making Space for the World
Both workshops underscored something Harris has championed throughout her career: the urgent necessity of translation in our interconnected world. In interviews, Harris has spoken of her early frustration as an English major, horrified to discover that meant studying only American and British writers when she wanted to read works from other languages and cultures as well. “Shamefully” monolingual (her word), she took every comparative literature course offered in English that she could.
That hunger to access literature from elsewhere has shaped Harris’s entire professional life. At Words Without Borders, she actively seeks work from underrepresented regions—particularly African literature in noncolonial languages, writing from Southeast Asia, and texts in lesser-known Indian languages. She reads primarily contemporary fiction in translation, consciously balancing what she calls her “early Eurocentrism” with work from across the globe.
For our students and guests in these workshops, who were translating from Japanese, Ukrainian, Arabic, Polish, Irish, Spanish, Chinese, and beyond, Harris’s career offered a vision of translation as essential cultural work. As Harris has noted, literature is crucial to understanding other cultures, and translation publishing has expanded enormously in the last fifteen years. Our students are entering the field at a moment of genuine possibility.
Equipped with specific strategies and a clearer sense of what editors need, workshop participants left these sessions excited to pitch their own work. They also left with something less tangible but equally valuable: the example of someone who has spent four decades creating space in English for the world’s literature, and who does so with rigor, respect, and remarkable generosity.
The connection between our program and Words Without Borders runs deep. Each summer, one of our students interns at the magazine, gaining firsthand experience. One of our graduates, Maggie Vlietstra, is now working at the magazine full time.
BU’s MFA program in Literary Translation regularly hosts workshops and readings with leading figures in translation publishing, connecting emerging translators with the broader literary community.
Thanks to the Boston University Center for the Humanities, whose generous support made this event possible.
(Text by J. Keith Vincent)