Past Events

Marjorie Attignol Salvodon is Professor of Humanities at Suffolk University, where she is also Associate Dean of Experiential Learning, Global Education & Public Impact. She is co-translator of Tomboy with Jehanne-Marie Gavarini (University of Nebraska Press, 2007) and translator of The Infamous Rosalie (University of Nebraska Press, 2013) and Désirée Congo (forthcoming from the University of Virginia Press, 2024).

Emily Wilson is a Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She has written several books and articles about ancient Greek and Roman literature and philosophy and their later receptions. She serves as an editor on the Norton Anthology of World Literature, and she edited a collected volume on ancient tragedy. She has published verse translations of Euripides, Sophocles, Seneca and Homer.

Yasmine Seale’s work includes poetry, translation, criticism and visual art. She studied literature and languages in Paris and Oxford, where she also did graduate work in Ottoman history. Her writing has appeared in Harper’s, The Nation, Paris Review, the Times Literary Supplement and elsewhere. She is the author, with Robin Moger, of Agitated Air: Poems after Ibn Arabi (Tenement Press). Among her translations from Arabic are The Annotated Arabian Nights (W. W. Norton) and Something Evergreen Called Life, a collection of poems by Rania Mamoun (Action Books). She is currently a Fellow of the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, where she is completing a translation of The Dove’s Collar by Ibn Hazm, an essay on the nature of love written in 11th-century Cordoba.

C. Francis Fisher is a poet and translator. Her writings have appeared or are forthcoming in The New England Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, and The Los Angeles Review of Books among others. Her poem, “Self-Portrait at 25” was selected as the winner for the 2021 Academy of American Poets Prize for Columbia University. Her first book of translations, In the Glittering Maw: Selected Poems of Joyce Mansour, is forthcoming with World Poetry Books in 2024.

Alex Braslavsky is a poet, translator, and scholar. She is a doctorate student in the Slavic Department at Harvard University, where she writes scholarship on Polish, Czech, and Russian poetry through a comparative poetics lens. Her dissertation centers on women who write poetry into their old age. Her translations of poems by Zuzanna Ginczanka were released with World Poetry Books in February of 2023. Her poems appear and are forthcoming in The Columbia Review, Conjunctions, and Colorado Review, among other journals.

Meredith McKinney is an Australian translator of classical and modern Japanese literature. She has published around twenty translated books, including classics such as The Pillow Book and two novels by the early modern master Natsume Sōseki (Penguin Classics). She is currently working on a translation of the early 14th century court lady’s memoir Towazugatari, due out with Penguin Classics in 2024. She is an Honorary Associate Professor at the Australian National University, and lives in a forest near the small town of Braidwood in New South Wales.

Jeffrey Zuckerman (he & il) is a translator of French, including books by the artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and the Dardenne brothers, the queer writers Jean Genet and Hervé Guibert, and the Mauritian novelists Ananda Devi, Shenaz Patel, and Carl de Souza. A graduate of Yale University, he has been a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize and the French-American Foundation Translation Prize, and a winner of the French Voices Grand Prize. In 2020 he was named a Chevalier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.

Jee Leong Koh is the author of Steep Tea (Carcanet), named a Best Book of the Year by UK’s Financial Times and a Finalist by Lambda Literary in the USA. His hybrid work of fiction, Snow at 5 PM: Translations of an insignificant Japanese poet, won the 2022 Singapore Literature Prize in English fiction. He was also shortlisted for the prize for The Pillow Book (Math Paper Press/Awai Books) and Connor and Seal (Sibling Rivalry). His second Carcanet book, Inspector Inspector, was published in late 2022. Koh’s work has been translated into Japanese, Chinese, Malay, Vietnamese, Russian, and Latvian. Originally from Singapore, Koh lives in New York City, where he heads the literary non-profit Singapore Unbound, the indie press Gaudy Boy, and the journal of Asian writing and art SUSPECT.

Dennis Wuerthner is serving as Assistant Professor of East Asian Literature at the Department of World Languages & Literatures of Boston University. His main field of research is premodern Korean literature, history and culture in a broader East Asian context. He is the author of A Study of Hypertexts of Kuunmong, focusing on Kuullu / Kuun’gi (Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 2017). His most recent contribution in the field of premodern Korean literature is Tales of the Strange by a Korean Confucian Monk, an in-depth study and fully annotated translation of Kǔmo sinhwa (New Tales of the Golden Turtle) by Kim Sisǔp (1435-1493). His new book, Poems and Stories for Overcoming Idleness: P’ahan chip by Yi Illo, the first complete translation in any Western language of P’ahan chip, the earliest Korean work of sihwa (C. shihua; “remarks on poetry”) and one of the oldest extant Korean sources, is forthcoming with the University of Hawaii Press in April 2024.

Isabel C. Gómez is an Associate Professor of Latin American and Iberian Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston where her research and teaching focus on translation studies, modern and contemporary Latin American and Latinx literatures, multilingualism, and experimental poetics; she also translates from Spanish and Portuguese into English. Her first book Cannibal Translation: Literary Reciprocity in Contemporary Latin America (Northwestern University Press 2023) received a 2022 Helen Tarter First Book Subvention Prize from the ACLA. She served as President of the ICLA Committee on Translation Studies 2020-2023, and this research collective has a forthcoming edited volume titled Translating Home in the Global South: Migration, Belonging, and Language Justice (Routledge 2024). Currently, her research focuses on the intersection of climate activism and translingual poetics; she was awarded a National Humanities Center Residential Fellowship for her next monograph Divest from English: Eco-Translation and Translingual Repair.

Megan McDowell has translated many of the most important Latin American writers working today, including Samanta Schweblin, Alejandro Zambra, Mariana Enriquez, Lina Meruane, and Carlos Fonseca. Her translations have won the National Book Award for Translated Literature, the English PEN award, the Premio Valle-Inclán, and two O. Henry Prizes, and have been nominated for the International Booker Prize (four times) and the Kirkus Prize. Her short story translations have been featured in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times Magazine, Tin House, McSweeney’s, and Granta, among others. In 2020 she won an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is from Richmond, KY and lives in Santiago, Chile.

Amelia Glaser is Professor of Literature at UCSD, where she also holds the endowed chair in Judaic Studies. She is the author of Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderlands (2012) and Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Literature of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine (2020). She translates poetry and prose from Ukrainian, Russian, Yiddish, and Italian. Her books of translated poetry include Proletpen: America’s Rebel-Yiddish Poets (2004) and Halyna Kruk’s A Crash Course in Molotov cocktails (2023, with Yuliya Ilchuk). She is currently at work on a book about contemporary Ukrainian poetry.

STH B24, 725 Commonwealth Avenue

CAS, 306, 725 Commonwealth Avenue

2:30 – 4:30

Professor of Spanish, Boston University, is the editor of the Collected Poems, the Epistolario completo (collected letters) and the lectures on poetry, painting and music of Federico García Lorca. He is the author of an award-winning biography, Fortune’s Favorite Child: The Uneasy Life of Walter Anderson and the translator, for Swan Isle Press (Chicago), of Juan Ramón Jiménez, The Complete Perfectionist (aphorisms about work and poetic creation); Sebastian’s Arrows: Letters and Mementos of Salvador Dalí and Federico García Lorca; and editor of a book of translations by Karl Maurer: The Azure Cloister: Thirty-Five Poems of Carlos Germán Belli.

CAS, 306, 725 Commonwealth Avenue

Friday 3PM

Hosted by the Boston University Department of Romance Studies and the Instituto Cervantes at Harvard University, the event features poet, novelist, and director of the Instituto Cervantes Luis García Montero and his translator Katie King. They will be in conversation about their new book, Someone Speaks Your Name.

5:00-6:30 STH B23

School of Theology, 745 Commonwealth Avenue

Emma Ramadan is a translator of poetry and prose from French. She is the recipient of the PEN Translation Prize, the Albertine Prize, an NEA Translation Fellowship, and a Fulbright. Her translations include Abdellah Taïa’s A Country For Dying, Anne Garréta’s In Concrete and Sphinx, Kamel Daoud’s Zabor, or the Psalms, and a co-translation of Marguerite Duras’ Me & Other Writing. 

Emma Ramadan will discuss how translating texts that exist outside the domain of classical French–specifically experimental literature and works from North Africa and the Arab World–often requires a subjective creativity, and how embracing the translator as an individual with their own reference points and understanding of the world can ultimately benefit the act of translation.

Joanna Trzeciak Huss is an associate professor at Kent State University. Her research concerns collaborative translation, self-translation, twentieth and twenty-first century Russian and Polish literature, and issues at the intersection of literature and philosophy. She has written on the poetry of Anna Akhmatova, the self-translation of Vladimir Nabokov, the poetry of Tadeusz Różewicz, and translation as palimpsest. She is editor of a special issue of The Polish Review devoted to Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk. Her translations from Polish and Russian have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Times Literary Supplement, Harpers, The Atlantic, Paris Review, Field, Zvezda, Boston Review, nonsite, and New Ohio Review, among others. Her books of poetry translation include Miracle Fair: Selected Poems of Wisława Szymborska (W.W. Norton) and Sobbing Superpower: Selected Poems of Tadeusz Różewicz (W.W. Norton). Her Firebird: Collected Poems of Zuzanna Ginczanka is forthcoming in 2022 from Zephyr Press. She is the recipient of the 2020 Michael Heim Prize for Collegial Translation.

Boris Dralyuk is a literary translator, a poet, and the Editor-in-Chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books. His work has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, London Review of Books, The Guardian, and other journals. He is the translator of several volumes from Russian, including the work of Isaac Babel, Andrey Kurkov, Maxim Osipov, and Mikhail Zoshchenko; the editor of 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution; and a co-editor of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (2015). His collection My Hollywood and Other Poems will be published by Paul Dry Books in April 2022.

DAVID KARASHIMA is associate professor of creative writing at Waseda University in Tokyo. He has translated a range of contemporary Japanese authors into English, including Hitomi Kanehara, Hisaki Matsuura, and Shinji Ishii. He coedited (with Elmer Luke) the anthology March Was Made of Yarn: Writers Respond to the Japanese Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Meltdown and is co-editor (with Michael Emmerich) of Pushkin Press’s Contemporary Japanese Novellas series. Who We’re Reading When We’re Reading Murakami was published by Soft Skull Press in September 2020. 

Michael Cooperson teaches Arabic at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on the cultural history of early Islamic Iraq. His translations from Arabic include Ibn al-Jawzī’s biography of the dissident ascetic Ibn Hanbal; it won the Sheikh Hamad Prize for Translation and International Understanding in 2016. His Englishing of  al-Hariri’s word-gaming Impostures (NYU Press, 2020) won a 2021 Sheikh Zayed Book Award in the translation category and was shortlisted for ALTA’s National Translation Award. His other interests include Maltese, Modern Greek, and Hawaiian language and culture.  

Karen Emmerich is a translator of modern Greek poetry and prose, as well as Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University, where she directs the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication. She is author of the book Literary Translation and the Making of Originals (Bloomsbury, 2017). She has received the National Translation Award, the Best Translated Book Award, the PEN Poetry in Translation Award, and grants from the NEA and PEN America for her translations.

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Ersi Sotiropoulos is the author of nineteen books of fiction and poetry. Her work has been translated into many languages and has been awarded in Greece with the National Book Prize twice, with the Book Critics’ Award, and the Athens Academy Prize. She has also received the Dante Alighieri Prize for her poetry in Italy and has been twice shortlisted for the European Book Prize. Her novel What’s Left of the Night won the Prix Méditerranée Étranger 2017 in France, and Karen Emmerich’s translation won the 2020 National Translation Award in the U.S.

In addition to her fiction and poetry, she worked on several artistic projects as well, participating in exhibitions of visual poetry and artist’s books and has written scripts for film and television. She served for nine years as the cultural attaché for the Greek Embassy in Rome and has been a fellow at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, at Princeton University, at Schloss Wiepersdorf in Germany, at the Sacatar Foundation in Brazil, at Villa Yourcenar in France, at the Shanghai Writing Program, at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination and others. She lives in Athens, Greece.

Tracy K. Smith is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, memoirist, editor, translator and librettist. She served as the 22^nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017-19, during which time she spearheaded American Conversations: Celebrating Poetry in Rural Communities with the Library of Congress, launched the American Public Media podcast The Slowdown, and edited the anthology American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time.

Smith is the author of the poetry collections Wade in the Water, which was awarded the 2018 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; Life on Mars, which won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize; Duende, winner of the 2006 James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets; and The Body’s Question, which received the 2003 Cave Canem Prize. Her memoir, Ordinary Light, was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in nonfiction. She is the co-translator (with Changtai Bi) of My Name Will Grow Wide like a Tree: Selected Poems of Yi Lei, which was a finalist for the 2021 Griffin International Poetry Prize. Such Color: New and Selected Poems will be published in October 2021.

Among her other honors are the Academy Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets, the Harvard Arts Medal, the Columbia Medal for Excellence, a Smithsonian Ingenuity Award and an Essence Literary Award. She is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Jeremy Tiang (he/ they) is a playwright, novelist and translator from Chinese. His work for the stage includes A Dream of Red Pavilions, The Last Days of Limehouse and Salesman之死, as well as translations of plays by Chen Si’an, Wei Yu-Chia, Zhan Jie and Quah Sy Ren. He has also translated over twenty-five books, including novels by Lo Yi-Chin, Yeng Pway Ngon, Yan Ge, Chan Ho-Kei, Zhang Yueran, Shuang Xuetao, Liu Xinwu and Geling Yan. His novel State of Emergency won the Singapore Literature Prize in 2018. Originally from Singapore, he trained as an actor at Drama Centre London and now lives in Flushing, Queens. www.JeremyTiang.com

Esther Allen’s translation of Antonio Di Benedetto’s 1956 novel Zama won the 2017 National Translation Award, given by the American Literary Translators Association. She was subsequently awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for the translation of the two other novels in what has come to be known as Di Benedetto’s Trilogy of Expectation. Her translation of the second, The Silentiary (originally published in Argentina in 1964), comes out from NYRB Classics in January of 2022, while translation of the third and final book in the trilogy, The Suicides (1969) is nearly complete. She is a professor at City University of New York Graduate Center, and at Baruch College, where she directs the Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence Program. Her essays, translations, reviews, and interviews have appeared in the New York Review of Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Paris Review, the Poetry Foundation website, Words Without Borders, Bomb, and other publications.

Arthur Goldhammer has a B.S. and Ph.D. in Mathematics from MIT and has taught at Brandeis University and Boston University. He has translated more than 125 books from French, for which he won numerous awards. His most recent award was for Thomas Piketty’s bestseller Capital in the 21st Century. At The Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (CES) at Harvard University he is Co-chair of the European Politics Seminar and Chair of the Visiting Scholars: New Research on Europe Seminar. A long-time observer of French politics, Goldhammer regularly contributes commentary on France and French politics on his blog site “French Politics.” He writes regularly for The American Prospect, The Nation, Democracy Journal, and Foreign Policy and serves on the editorial boards of The Tocqueville Review and French Politics, Culture, and Society.

Allison Markin Powell has been awarded grants from English PEN and the NEA, and the 2020 PEN America Translation Prize for The Ten Loves of Nishino by Hiromi Kawakami. Her other translations include works by Osamu Dazai, Kanako Nishi, and Fuminori Nakamura. She was the co-organizer and co-host of the “Translating the Future” conference, served as cochair of the PEN America Translation Committee and currently represents the committee on PEN’s Board of Trustees, and she maintains the database Japanese Literature in English.

Ann Goldstein is a former editor at The New Yorker. She has translated works by, among others, Elena Ferrante, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Alessandro Baricco, and is the editor of the Complete Works of Primo Levi in English. She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and awards from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Natasha Hakimi Zapata is a London-based journalist, translator and lecturer. Her work has appeared in The Nation, Los Angeles Review of Books, Truthdig, Los Angeles Magazine, and elsewhere, and has received several Southern California Journalism and National Arts & Entertainment Journalism awards, among other honors. In 2016, Literal Publishing released full-length bilingual editions of her translations of Alicia Borinsky’s My Husband’s Woman (translated with the author) and Liliana Lukin’s Theater of Operations. She has taught creative writing at Boston University and is currently teaching translation at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Fiona Mackintosh is a Senior Lecturer in Latin American Literature at the University of Edinburgh. She has particular interests in literary translation and comparative literature, and within Latin American literature she focuses on women’s writing and poetry. Her co-translation with Iona Macintyre of Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s The Adventures of China Iron (Charco Press, 2019) was short-listed for the 2020 International Booker Prize.

Iona Macintyre is a Senior Lecturer in the department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at the University of Edinburgh where she teaches Latin American literature and Spanish-to-English translation. Her co-translation with Fiona Mackintosh of Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s The Adventures of China Iron (Charco Press, 2019) was short-listed for the 2020 International Booker Prize and she also translated a chapter of the Portuguese collaborative lockdown novel Bode Inspiratório – Escape Goat (Relógio D’Água Editores, 2020).

Jhumpa Lahiri is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her debut collection of stories, Interpreter of Maladies, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the PEN/Hemingway Award and The New Yorker Debut of the Year. Her novel The Namesakewas a New York Times Notable Book, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist and was selected as one of the best books of the year by USA Today and Entertainment Weekly, among other publications. Her book, The Lowland, won the DSC award for South Asian fiction, and was a finalist for both the Man Booker prize and the National Book Award in fiction. Her nonfiction includes The Clothing of Books which was originally published in Italy as Il vestito dei libri. She has translated two books by Domenico Starnone: Ties, and Trick. She recently edited and partly translated The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories. In 2021 she will publish her first collection of poems in Italian Il quaderno di Nerina (Guanda, 2021). Her first full-length self-translation is her forthcoming novel, Whereabouts (Knopf, May 04, 2021).

Juliet Winters Carpenter is professor emerita of English at Doshisha Women’s College in Kyoto. She has translated over eighty books in a variety of genres. Her first translated novel, Secret Rendezvous by Abe Kobo, received the 1980 Japan-US Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. In 2014, A True Novel by Minae Mizumura received the same prize as well as the American Translators Association Lewis Galantière Award. Carpenter’s forthcoming translations in 2021 include An I-Novel by Minae Mizumura, from Columbia UP; At the End of the Matinee by Hirano Keiichiro, from Amazon Crossing; and Pax Tokugawana: The Cultural Flowering of Japan, 1603-1853 by Haga Toru, from Japan Library.

Emily Apter is Silver Professor of French, Literature and Thought and Comparative Literature and serves as Chair of Comparative Literature at New York University. Her most recent books include: Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse and the Impolitic (Verso, 2018), Against World Literature:  On the Politics of Untranslatability (2013),Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (co-edited with Barbara Cassin, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood) (2014); and The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (2006).  She is currently finishing a book titled What is Just Translation? which takes up questions of translation and law, sexual safety, and transmediality.   Her essays have appeared in October, PMLA, Comparative Literature, Art Journal, Third Text, Paragraph, boundary 2, Artforum and Critical Inquiry. In 2019 she was the Daimler Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.  In 2017-18 she served as President of the American Comparative Literature Association. In fall 2014 she was a Humanities Council Fellow at Princeton University.  And in 2003-2004 she was a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient.

Monday, February 22, 4-6pm on Zoom

“Lysistrata’s Voices: Ten Ways to Translate an Aristophanic Comedy”

Lecture by Simone Beta, from the Università di Siena

Michael Berry is Professor of Contemporary Chinese Cultural Studies and Director of the Center for Chinese Studies at UCLA. He is the author of five books on Chinese cinema, including Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers (2006) and A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film (2008). He has served as a film consultant and a juror for numerous film festivals, including the Golden Horse (Taiwan) and the Fresh Wave (Hong Kong). He is also the translator of several books by contemporary Chinese writers, including Wild Kids (2000), Nanjing 1937: A Love Story (2002), To Live (2004), The Song of Everlasting Sorrow (2008), Remains of Life (2017) and Wuhan Diary (2020).

Juan Mandelbaum has been producing feature length documentaries for over thirty years. His independent productions have aired on PBS, including Caetano in Bahia, Ringl and Pit, A New World of Music, and the Poetry Heaven series.  His film Our Disappeared/Nuestros Desaparecidos aired on the national PBS series Independent Lens and played at over 30 festivals worldwide.

Abigail Gillman is Professor of Hebrew, German and Comparative Literature in the Department of World Languages and Literatures at Boston University, where she also affiliates with the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies and the Graduate Program in Religion.  She is the author of Viennese Jewish Modernism: Freud, Hofmannsthal, Beer-Hofmann and Schnitzler (Penn State Press, 2009) and A History of German Jewish Bible Translation (University of Chicago Press, 2018). She is also an editor of the Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception (De Gruyter). Her current research pertains to the mashal (parable) and parabolic style across Jewish literature, and to Jewish translation history.

Benjamin Moser is the author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book of 2009. For his work bringing Clarice Lispector to international prominence, he received Brazil’s first State Prize for Cultural Diplomacy. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017, and his latest book, Sontag: Her Life and Work, won the Pulitzer Prize.

Peter Bush’s first literary translation was Juan Goytisolo’s Forbidden Territory (1989) and he went on to translate eleven other books by this writer, including The Marx Family Saga (1996) and Exiled from Almost Everywhere (2011), both awarded the Ramón del Valle-Inclán Literary Translation Prize.  His translation of Josep Pla’s The Gray Notebook won the 2014 Ramon Llull Literary Translation Prize. Recent work includes Teresa Solana’s The First Prehistoric Serial Killer and Other Stories, Barcelona Tales from Cervantes to Najat El Hachmi and Quim Monzó’s Why, Why, Why?; in press Josep Pla’s Salt Water, in process, Balzac’s The Lily in the Valley.  He is a former Director of the British Centre for Literary Translation and Professor of Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia.

Alberto Manguel is an Argentinian-Canadian writer, translator, editor and critic. He has published several novels, and non-fiction, including Packing My Library, With Borges, A History of Reading, Fabulous Monsters and (together with Gianni Guadalupi) The Dictionary of Imaginary Places. He has received numerous international awards, among others the Guggenheim in 2004, Commander of the Order of Arts & Letters from France in 2014, the Formentor Prize and the Alfonso Reyes Prize in 2017, the Gutenberg Prize 2018 and Officer of the Order of Canada 2018. He is doctor honoris causa of the universities of Ottawa and York in Canada, and Liège in Belgium and Anglo Ruskin in Cambridge, UK. Until August of 2018 he was the director of the National Library of Argentina.

Guillermo Martínez is an Argentian novelist, short story writer and essayist. He is the author of the book of short stories Infierno grande, the novels Acerca de Roderer, Crímenes imperceptibles, and the essay Borges y la matemática, among others. His novel Crímenes imperceptibles was awarded with the argentinean Planeta Prize, and had an international success. It has been translated to 40 languages and made into a film by Spanish director Alex de la Iglesia (The Oxford Murders). He was awarded with the Gabriel García Márquez Hispanoamerican Prize for his book of short stories Una felicidad repulsiva. His last novel, Los crímenes de Alicia, was awarded with the Spanish Nadal Prize (2019).

Margaret Litvin is a historian of modern Arabic literature and theatre. Her book Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost has been taught in university courses anging from “Theatre History” to “The New Comparative Literature” to “Anthropology of the Middle East.”. Her current research continues the effort to situate Arab cultural production in global context. Litvin’s research has been recognized with an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship to Berlin (2017-8), an ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship to Sweden (2015-6), a Peter Paul Career Development Professorship at BU (2009-11), an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Yale University, and two CASA fellowships to Cairo (2001-2 and 2011).

Marian Schwartz is a prize-winning translator of Russian fiction and nonfiction whose most recent publications are Leonid Yuzefovich’s Horsemen of the Sands (Archipelago), Olga Slavnikova’s The Man Who Couldn’t Die: The Tale of an Authentic Human Being (Columbia University Press), and the second volume of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s four-volume March 1917: The Red Wheel, Node III (University of Notre Dame Press). Her translation of Nina Berberova’s novella The Last and the First is forthcoming from Pushkin Press. In 2014 she received the Read Russia Prize for Contemporary Russian Literature and in 2018 the Linda Gaboriau Award for Translation from the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.

Danuta Borchardt is a writer, translator, and psychiatrist. Her translations include Ferdydurke (2000) by the Polish writer and playwright Witold Gombrowicz, The Bonny Hind (1999) by Witold Sulkowski. She is the author of Life Behind an Author’s Works–Memoir of a Translator: How I Came to Translate Witold Gombrowicz and the Many Faces of Thom. Her own fiction has appeared in the journal Exquisite Corpse. Among others, she has received the following awards: 2001National Translation Award for her version of Gombrowicz’s foundational novel, Ferdydurke, 2010 Found-in-Translation Award for her version of Gombrowicz’s novel Pornografía.

Jennifer Croft is the author of Homesick and Serpientes y escaleras and the co-winner with Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk of The International Booker for the novel Flights. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literary Studies from Northwestern University and an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa, and her recent writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Granta.

Regina Galasso is an associate professor in the Spanish and Portuguese Program and Director of the Translation Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of Translating New York: The City’s Languages in Iberian Literatures (Liverpool UP, 2018), recipient of the 2017 NeMLA Book Award. Among other book publications and articles, she is the editor, with Evelyn Scaramella, of Avenues of Translation: The City in Iberian and Latin American Writing (Bucknell UP, 2019) and translator of Alicia Borinsky’s Lost Cities Go to Paradise (Swan Isle P, 2015). Her research and teaching interests include literary urban studies, literary translation, and Iberian literatures.

Ilan Stavans is Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities, Latin American, and Latino Culture at Amherst College, publisher of Restless Books, and host of the NPR podcast “In Contrast.” He has translated Borges, Neruda, Sor Juana, Mariano Azuela, and Juan Rulfo into English, Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop into Spanish, Yehuda Halevi and Yehuda Amichai from Hebrew, Isaac Bashevis Singer from Yiddish, and Cervantes and Shakespeare into Spanglish. The recipient of numerous awards and honors, his books, translated into twenty languages, have been adapted into film, TV, radio, and theater.

Chantal Ringuet is a Canadian award-winning author, scholar and translator. She is the author of collections of poems (2009 Jacques-Poirier literary award) and of a cultural synthesis and an anthology on Yiddish culture and literature Montreal. With Gérard Rabinovitch, she has published Les révolutions de Leonard Cohen (PUQ, 2016), which received a 2017 Canadian Jewish Literary Award. With Pierre Anctil, she has published a translation of the early biography of Marc Chagall (Mon univers. Autobiographie, Fides, 2017). She has been a Fellow of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, Scholar-in-Residence at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute (Brandeis University) and Writer-in-Residence and literary translator in residence at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. In 2019, she has inaugurated the Gröndalshus Writers’ Residence in Reykjavik UNESCO City of Literature.

Adel Fauzetdinova is an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Translation Studies at Westfield State University. She received her PhD in Hispanic Language and Literatures from Boston University in 2016. Her special research focus on cultural, literary, and artistic dialogues between Latin America and Russia is reflected in the forthcoming book How “Bad” Translations Made “Good” Literature: The “Dostoevsky on the Pampas” Case (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020). Along with teaching translation, she has been an active contributor to the field of Translation Studies through a variety of conference panels. Adel is also a practicing translator and a poet.

Robert Pinsky’s most recent book is the anthology The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall.  His most recent book of poems is At the Foundling Hospital. As three-time U.S. Poet Laureate he founded the Favorite Poem Project. His honors include the Italian Premio Capri and the Korean Manhae Award. Robert Pinsky’s best-selling translation The Inferno of Dante was greeted by Stephen Greenblatt as “the premier modern text for English-language readers to experience Dante’s power”. His other notable work on translation has been as a colleague and neighbor of Czesław Miłosz, assisting the great (and bilingual) Polish poet with English versions of his own work.

Tuesday, November 19, 2019

Hiroko Oyamada and David Boyd in Reading and Conversation

5:00-7:00pm, CAS Room B36, 725 Commonwealth Avenue

An award-winning contemporary Japanese writer in conversation with her award-winning translator about her first book in English.
Sponsored by the BU Center for Humanities, BU Center for the Study of Asia, World Languages & Literatures, and the Japanese Language Program

Tuesday, November 19, 2019: Artist Talk by Jen Calleja

6:00-7:00pm, Kilachand Honors College, Common Room

Jen Calleja is a writer, literary translator from German and anti-harassment activist. This Artist’s Talk will present a range of projects from her practice as a writer, translator and beyond.

Translation Now Conference, September 28-29, 2018

Click here to be directed to the full webpage on the CAS World Languages & Literatures’ website.
Video recordings from the conference are available here.

Monkey Business: Japan/America Writers Dialogue, May 1, 2017

Tale of Genji Symposium. November 5, 2016

Click here to view full event information and see video recordings from various panels.

Translating and Teaching Premodern Persian Literature. April 24-25, 2014

Click here to view full event information.