The BU Translation Seminar offers a lecture series open to the public each spring semester.
Teaching, studying, and practicing literary translation has a long tradition at Boston University. Our first lecture series on translation was offered in 1978, at a time before Translation Studies was even a recognized field. Invited speakers from around the world, including many of the most accomplished translators and literary figures of the last half-century, have been guests at the Seminar.
Asta Fanney Sirurðardottir, an Icelandic poet, and her translator, Vala Thorodds speaking at the Translation Seminar in 2023.
The Seminar has in turn fostered the literary careers of generations of BU students, teaching them the art of translation and bringing them into fruitful contact with established translators, editors, publishers, and writers worldwide. The lectures are also open to the public and attract audiences from all over Boston and New England.
For an alphabetical list of guest lecturers since 1978, click here.
In Spring 2024 the Friday Lectures will be moderated by Keith Vincent.
(scroll down for speaker bios)
January 27, 2024. Amelia Glaser- The Shadow Theater: Translating and Archiving Ukranian War Poetry in a Digital Era
CAS, 306, 725 Commonwealth Avenue
2:30 – 4:30
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.
February 2, 2024. Megan McDowell - FAQ's: Highly subjective answers to all your questions about contemporary Spanish literary translation
CAS, 306, 725 Commonwealth Avenue
2:30 – 4:30
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.
February 9, 2024. Isabel C. Gómez - Cannibal Translation: Roots, Routes, and Recipes from Latin American Literary Praxis
CAS, 306, 725 Commonwealth Avenue
2:30 – 4:30
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.
February 16, 2024. Dennis Wuerthner - Translating Poems and Stories from Medieval Korea
CAS, 306, 725 Commonwealth Avenue
2:30 – 4:30
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’ahanchip, 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.
February 23, 2024. Jee Leong Koh - Living the Li(f)e of Translation in English
CAS, 306, 725 Commonwealth Avenue
2:30 – 4:30
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.
March 1, 2024. Jeffrey Zuckerman - My Moi: Translation as Autobiography
CAS, 306, 725 Commonwealth Avenue
2:30 – 4:30
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.
March 22, 2024. Meredith McKinney - Whose side are we on? — some thoughts on translating difference between Japanese and English
CAS, 306, 725 Commonwealth Avenue
2:30 – 4:30
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.
March 27, 2024. C. Francis Fisher and Alex Braslavsky - Emerging Translators at World Poetry Books: A conversation between Joyce Mansour and Zuzanna Ginczanka
CAS, 306, 725 Commonwealth Avenue
2:30 – 4:30
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.
April 5, 2024. Yasmine Seale - Always Almost: Approaching The 1001 Nights
CAS, 306, 725 Commonwealth Avenue
2:30 – 4:30
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..
April 12, 2024. Emily Wilson - Re-translating TheIliad
CAS, 306, 725 Commonwealth Avenue
2:30 – 4:30
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.
April 19, 2024. Marjorie Salvodon - Daring to be free: Translating Narratives of Resistance in French
CAS, 306, 725 Commonwealth Avenue
2:30 – 4:30
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).
