Our flagship Lecture Series, established in 1978 before Translation Studies was even a recognized field, has welcomed some of the most accomplished translators and literary figures of the last half-century.
Held on most Friday afternoons each spring, the Translation Seminar lectures offer intensive and lively literary conversations about what makes literature work across languages. Students, writers, scholars, and translators from across Boston and New England gather to debate whether Odysseus should be called a “complicated man,” how to capture dialects in translation, what to do with rhyme and meter, and other fundamental questions about literary craft. The Q&A sessions, which often run longer than the lectures themselves, show how the translator’s task is the ultimate form of close reading and a fine art in its own right that requires of its practitioners not just linguistic precision and deep cultural understanding, but also creativity and imagination.
View past lectures here. Or browse our alphabetical list of guest lecturers since 1978.
2026 Lecture Series
Recordings of last year’s lectures can be found here.
The 2026 lecture series will be moderated by Professor William Waters.
January 23 – Greening in the Garden: How Translation Transforms English
January 23, 2026. Emma Ramadan – Greening in the Garden: How Translation Transforms English
CAS 306, 725 Commonwealth Avenue
2:30 – 4:15
Emma Ramadan is a literary translator of over 40 books from French. She has been awarded the PEN Translation Prize, the Albertine Prize, the James Tait Black Prize, two NEA Fellowships, and a Fulbright. Her translations include Anne Garréta’s Sphinx, Marguerite Duras’s The Easy Life, Abdellah Taïa’s Living in Your Light, and Lamia Ziadé’s My Port of Beirut. She is also the co-founder and former owner of Riffraff bookstore and bar in Providence, RI, and the current program director of the Art Omi: Writers Residency in upstate New York.
January 30 – Translation as Kaijuology
January 23, 2026. Jeffrey Angles – Translation as Kaijuology
CAS 306, 725 Commonwealth Avenue
2:30 – 4:15
Jeffrey Angles is an award-winning poet, translator, and professor of Japanese literature at Western Michigan University. He is the author of Writing the Love of Boys (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and These Things Here and Now: Poetic Responses to the March 11, 2011 Disasters (Josai University Press, 2016), as well as numerous articles about expressions of ideology in modern Japanese literature. Among his recent translations of modern Japanese poets are the modern novel-in-verse The Thorn Puller by Itō Hiromi (Stone Bridge Press, 2022) and a large selection of poetry by Nakahara Chūya called Angel at the Earth’s Extreme (Penguin, 2026). One of his special interests is mystery and adventure writing, especially that related to monsters, ghosts, and the uncanny. He has also recently translated a number of monster-related novels, including a bestselling translation of the 1955 work, Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) and the 1961 novel, The Luminous Fairies and Mothra (University of Minnesota Press, 2026).
Abstract: Godzilla and Mothra are two of the most easily recognizable cinematic monsters of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but until very recently, relatively few international fans were aware that these monsters had early roots in literature too. Angles’ 2023 translation of the 1955 novellas Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again by Kayama Shigeru became a small bestseller, partly because of its long, scholarly afterword, which raised questions about the ways that the eponymous monster is remembered in the cultural imagination. In January 2026, his publication of the 1961 novella The Luminous Fairies and Mothra by three authors—Nakamura Shin’ichirō, Fukunaga Takehiko, and Hotta Yoshie—is hitting bookshelves. Once again, the translation is accompanied by a long afterword, which argues that unlike the relatively apolitical film made by Toho Studios, the novella is a strongly socially engaged piece of fiction, born out of sympathetic responses to the enormous Ampo Protests that rocked the nation in 1960. In this presentation, Angles will talk about some of the issues he encountered while working on his translations. For instance, how were the sociopolitical implications of these stories undermined when Toho translated them into cinematic form? What are the genders of the monsters? In what ways might the texts that Angles has translated complicate or even queer our understandings of the monsters we think we know so well? Angles will also explore about the complex relationship between fandom and literary scholarship. How might the work of the scholar-translator interact with the discourse of fandom even while diverging from some of its most commonly held assumptions?
February 6 – Translation as Problem-Solving
February 6, 2026. Peter J. Schwartz – Translation as Problem-Solving
CAS 306, 725 Commonwealth Avenue
2:30 – 4:15
Peter J. Schwartz is Associate Professor of German and Comparative Literature and Film in the Department of World Languages and Literatures at Boston University, where he also teaches in the Core, the Cinema and Media Studies program, and the Kilachand Honors College. He is the author of After Jena: Goethe’s Elective Affinities and the End of the Old Regime (2010), co-editor of Labour in a Single Shot: Critical Perspectives on Antje Ehmann and Harun Farocki’s Global Video Project (2021), and translator of André Jolles’s Simple Forms (2017) and Mazzino Montinari’s What Nietzsche Really Said: A Reader’s Guide (2026). He translates from German, French, Dutch and Italian.
February 13 – Cannibal Translation vs. AI: a Historia Verdadera
February 13, 2026. Chloe García Roberts – Cannibal Translation vs. AI: a Historia Verdadera
CAS 306, 725 Commonwealth Avenue
2:30 – 4:15
Chloe García Roberts is a poet and translator from Spanish and Chinese. Her translations include Li Shangyin’s Derangements of My Contemporaries: Miscellaneous Notes (New Directions), which was awarded a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, and a collected poems of Li Shangyin published in the New York Review Books / Poets series. She is the recipient of a 2021 NEA fellowship in translation for her translation of the novel Carne de Dios by Mexican author Homero Aridjis (forthcoming from University of Arizona Press in 2025). She lives outside Boston and works as deputy editor of Harvard Review, translation editor for the Harvard Library Bulletin, and as a lecturer of poetry at MIT.
February 20 – The Art of Getting Nowhere: On Translating Kafka’s Diaries
February 20, 2026. Ross Benjamin – The Art of Getting Nowhere: On Translating Kafka’s Diaries
CAS 306, 725 Commonwealth Avenue
2:30 – 4:15
Ross Benjamin’s translations include Franz Kafka’s Diaries (2023), Daniel Kehlmann’s The Director (2025), Tyll (2020) which was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker International Prize, You Should Have Left (2017), Clemens J. Setz’s Indigo (2014), Joseph Roth’s Job (2010), Kevin Vennemann’s Close to Jedenew (2008), and Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hyperion (2008). He received a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship, was awarded the 2010 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for his rendering of Michael Maar’s Speak, Nabokov (2009) and a 2012 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship to translate Clemens J. Setz’s The Frequencies. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, Bookforum, The Nation, and other publications. He is coeditor of the Substack FRANZ, where he regularly posts new translations of Kafka’s complete letters in chronological order. He was a 2003–2004 Fulbright Scholar in Berlin and is a graduate of Vassar College.
March 20 – Prismatic Rilke: Translation, Version, Multiple
CAS 306, 725 Commonwealth Avenue
2:30 – 4:15
Professor Karen Leeder (FRSA, MAE) is a writer and translator and Schwarz-Taylor Chair of German Language Literature at the University of Oxford. Her research lies especially in modern and contemporary poetry and she has published widely on various topics such as spectres and angels, as well as translation, and authors such as Brecht, Rilke and Durs Grünbein. She has published book-length translations of Volker Braun, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Michael Krüger, Durs Grünbein, Evelyn Schlag, Ulrike Almut Sandig, and Raoul Schrott among others. She has won many awards, including the Schlegel-Tieck prize (2004 and 2021); the Stephen Spender Open Prize (2011), the EUNIC European new voices award and a Pen Heim Award (2018); the John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize (2018) and, most recently, the Griffin Prize 2025 for her translation of Durs Grünbein, Psyche Running: Selected Poems 2005-2022 (Seagull, 2024).
March 27 – Too Horny for Hexameter: Translating Elegiac Couplets
March 27, 2026. Christopher Childers – Too Horny for Hexameter: Translating Elegiac Couplets
CAS 306, 725 Commonwealth Avenue
2:30 – 4:15
[Watch this space!]
April 3 – Translating Medea: The Poetry and the Drama of the Woman and the Play
April 3, 2026. V. Sophie Klein – Translating Medea: The Poetry and the Drama of the Woman and the Play
CAS 306, 725 Commonwealth Avenue
2:30 – 4:15
Dr. Sophie Klein is a classicist who loves reading, seeing, staging, and teaching ancient drama. She has taught a wide range of courses on language, civilization, literature, and drama at both Boston University and Boston College. Her research focuses on the ways in which themes and devices from Greek and Roman theater pervade and influence other ancient and modern art forms. Her projects have explored: Horace’s use of dramatic material in the Sermones and Epistles, the chorus in Sophocles’ Ajax, mute characters in the plays of Plautus and Terence, parallels between Roman comedy and modern television sitcoms, and the striking similarities between the comedic formulas employed by Greek satyr drama and the American cartoon, Animaniacs.
She is the author of a book-length work on Plautus’ Menaechmi.
In addition to her academic work, Dr. Klein has written several plays inspired by classical literature.
April 17 – Translating Translation: Multilingual Texts in Taiwan's Literature
April 17, 2026. Lin King – Translating Translation: Multilingual Texts in Taiwan’s Literature
CAS 306, 725 Commonwealth Avenue
2:30 – 4:15
Lin King is a writer and translator based in Taipei and New York. Her fiction has appeared in One Story, Boston Review, and Joyland, among others, and has received the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Her translations from Mandarin and Japanese into English include the graphic novel series The Boy from Clearwater (Chronicle Books, 2023) by Yu Pei-Yun and Zhou Jian-Xin and the novel Taiwan Travelogue (Graywolf Press, 2020) by Yang Shuang-Zi, which won the 2024 National Book Award in Translated Literature. Her debut novel is forthcoming in 2027.
April 20 – Ekphrasis as Cultural Translation and Method in Pamuk’s My Name is Red
April 20, 2026. Erdağ Göknar – Ekphrasis as Cultural Translation and Method in Pamuk’s My Name is Red
CAS 306, 725 Commonwealth Avenue
2:30 – 4:15
Erdağ Göknar is Associate Professor of Turkish Studies at Duke University and former director of the Duke Middle East Studies Center. He is a scholar of literary and cultural studies and an award-winning translator whose research focuses on the intersections of literature and politics in Turkey and the Middle East; specifically, on late Ottoman legacies in modern and contemporary Turkish fiction, historiography, and popular culture. His books and translations include Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy: The Politics of the Turkish Novel (Routledge, 2013); a co-edited sourcebook, Mediterranean Passages: Readings from Dido to Derrida (UNC Press, 2008); and English-language translations of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s A Mind at Peace(Archipelago Books, 2011); Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red (Knopf, 2010; 2001) and Atiq Rahimi’s Earth and Ashes (Harcourt, 2002; Other 2010). He has also written a collection of poetry, Nomadologies (Turtle Point, 2017), and co-edited Conversations with Orhan Pamuk (University Press of Mississippi, 2024). His articles and commentaries have appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly, the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Literature and Theology and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is the recipient of two NEA Translation Fellowships, and his current research focuses on intersections of law and literature in the context of the Allied occupation of Istanbul (1918-23) through historical legal cases.