The BU Translation Seminar offers a lecture series open to the public each spring semester.
In Spring 2024 the Friday Lectures will be moderated by Keith Vincent. The poster with an exciting lineup is coming soon!
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.
January 27. Ken Liu - Betrayal With Integrity: Two Case Studies on Colonial and Postcolonial Power Dynamics in Translation To/From Chinese
CAS, 306, 725 Commonwealth Avenue
2:30 – 4:30
Ken Liu (http://kenliu.name) is an American author of speculative fiction. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards, he wrote the Dandelion Dynasty, a silkpunk epic fantasy series (starting with The Grace of Kings), as well as short story collections The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories and The Hidden Girl and Other Stories. He also penned the Star Wars novel The Legends of Luke Skywalker. Liu is also the translator for Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem, Hao Jingfang’s “Folding Beijing” and Vagabonds, Chen Qiufan’s Waste Tide, as well as the editor of Invisible Planetsand Broken Stars, anthologies of contemporary Chinese science fiction. Prior to becoming a full-time writer, Liu worked as a software engineer, corporate lawyer, and litigation consultant. Liu frequently speaks at conferences and universities on a variety of topics, including futurism, cryptocurrency, history of technology, bookmaking, narrative futures, and the mathematics of origami.
February 10. James Wood - Translating Madame Bovary into English: Some Instances
CAS, 306, 725 Commonwealth Avenue
2:30 – 4:30
James Wood is a staff writer at the New Yorker, where he writes largely about the novel, and Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University. He is the author of two works of fiction; a study of the novel, “How Fiction Works”; and of several books of essays, most recently “Serious Noticing: Selected Essays, 1997-2019.” Before joining the New Yorker in 2008, he was a senior editor at The New Republic (1995-2008), and a literary critic at The Guardian (1988-1995).
February 3. Ted Goossen - Japanese Monkeys in the Making: Fifteen years of Monkey(Business)
CAS, 306, 725 Commonwealth Avenue
2:30 – 4:30
Theodore (Ted) Goossen is Professor of Humanities at York University in Toronto, Canada, a founding member of the Department of Contemporary Literary Studies at the University of Tokyo, and a co-founder of the Canada Japan Society. He has translated many Japanese authors including Hiromi Kawakami, Naoya Shiga, and Haruki Murakami and is editor of The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories and co-editor of MONKEY (formerly Monkey Business) the only literary journal devoted to Japanese contemporary writing in English translation. At present, he is translating Kawakami’s recent novel, The Third Love (Sandome no Koi).
February 17. Susan Harris and Chad Post - Publishing Translations
CAS, 306, 725 Commonwealth Avenue
2:30 – 4:30
Susan Harris is the editorial director of Words Without Borders and the co-editor, with Ilya Kaminsky, of The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry. She is the former director and editor in chief of Northwestern University Press, where she founded the Hydra imprint in literature in translation and published Imre Kertész, Herta Müller, and Olga Tokarczuk before they were awarded their Nobel Prizes.
Chad W. Post is the director of Open Letter Books, a press at the University of Rochester dedicated to publishing contemporary literature from around the world. In addition, he is the managing editor of Three Percent, a blog and review site that promotes literature in translation and is home to the Translation Database, the Best Translated Book Awards, and the Three Percent and Two Month Review podcasts. He is also the author of The Three Percent Problem: Rants and Responses on Publishing, Translation, and the Future of Reading. His articles and book reviews have appeared in a range of publications including The Believer, Publishing Perspectives, the Wall Street Journal culture blog, Bookforum, Rolling Stone, and Quarterly Conversation, among others.
February 24. Huda Fakhreddine - The Translated Poem, An Invitation to the Arabic Tradition
CAS, 306, 725 Commonwealth Avenue
2:30 – 4:30
Huda Fakhreddine is an associate professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the co-translator of Lighthouse for the Drowning, The Sky That Denied Me, and Come Take a Gentle Stab: Selections from Salim Barakat. Her translations of modern Arabic poems have appeared in Banipal, World Literature Today, Nimrod, ArabLit Quarterly and Asymptote among others.
March 17. Vala Thorodds and Ásta Fanney Sigurðardóttir - Destination Unknown: Translating Avant-garde Icelandic poetry
CAS, 306, 725 Commonwealth Avenue
2:30 – 4:30
Vala Thorodds is a poet, publisher, and editor, as well as a translator from Icelandic to English. Her work has appeared in publications including The Guardian, Granta, and The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, and she recently received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant for her translation of the novel Swanfolk by Kristín Ómarsdóttir, published in 2022 by Harvill Secker (UK) and HarperVia (US). Her translation of Ómarsdóttir’s selected poems, Waitress in Fall, was a White Review and Sunday Times poetry book of the year. She is currently an MFA candidate in Literary Translation at the University of Iowa.
Ásta Fanney Sigurðardóttir was born in 1987 in Reykjavík, Iceland. She studied fine art at the Iceland University of the Arts and is a practising visual artist as well as a composer, musician, and singer. She co-founded the artist-led gallery Kunstschlager in Reykjavík and is a member of the electro-pop trio aiYa, as well as founder of the experimental poetry festival Suttungur. For her multidisciplinary poetry practice – which spans text, music, performance, visual art and film – Ásta was nominated for the Bernard Heidsieck Literary Prize by the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2021. She has also received the prestigious Ljóðstafur Jóns úr Vör poetry prize, awarded annually in Iceland for a single poem. Ásta’s debut poetry collection, Eilífðarnón, was published in Iceland in 2019 and subsequently published in Swedish, German, and English translations.
March 24. Julia Sanches - Walking the Tightrope: Translating Cultural Difference and Stylistic Ambiguity in Spanish
CAS, 306, 725 Commonwealth Avenue
2:30 – 4:30
Julia Sanches translates books from Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan into English. In 2022, her translation of Claudia Hernández’s Slash and Burn was awarded a PEN Heim grant and short-listed for the Queen Sofía Translation Prize as well as the Premio Valle Inclán, while her translation of Mariana Oliver’s Migratory Birds won the 2022 PEN Translation Prize. Born in Brazil, Julia now lives in New England.
March 31. Peter Constantine - Sounding Natural: The Craft of Dialogue in Translation
CAS, 306, 725 Commonwealth Avenue
2:30 – 4:30
Peter Constantine’s recent translations include works by Voltaire, Rousseau, Machiavelli, Gogol, and Tolstoy. His translation of the complete works of Isaac Babel, published by W. W. Norton in 2001, received the Koret Jewish Literature Award and a National Jewish Book Award citation. He co-edited A Century of Greek Poetry: 1900-2000, and the anthology The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present, which W.W. Norton published in 2010. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and was awarded the PEN Translation Prize for Six Early Stories by Thomas Mann, and the National Translation Award for The Undiscovered Chekhov. He is Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Connecticut and the publisher of World Poetry Books.
April 14. Carlos Rojas - Translating Difference: On Preserving Linguistic Divides in Literature from the Global Sinosphere
CAS, 306, 725 Commonwealth Avenue
2:30 – 4:30
Carlos Rojas is Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies, Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies, and Cinematic Arts at Duke University. He is the author of The Naked Gaze: Reflections on Chinese Modernity (2008), The Great Wall: A Cultural History (2010), and Homesickness: Culture, Contagion, and National Transformation in Modern China (2015). He is also the co-editor of 8 volumes, including Writing Taiwan: A New Literary History, with David Der-wei Wang (2007), Rethinking Chinese Popular Culture: Cannibalizations of the Canon, with Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (2009), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures, with Andrea Bachner (2016), and Reading China Against the Grain: Imagining Communities, with Meihwa Sung (2020), and the translator of 16 volumes of literary fiction and critique. He is also the co-editor of the Duke University Press’s Sinotheory book series, and the Associate Editor-in-Chief, PRISM: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature.
April 21. Christopher Maurer - In My Brother's Footsteps,
Toward a Peruvian Poet (Carlos Germán Belli)
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.
