{"id":1473,"date":"2019-08-27T15:54:36","date_gmt":"2019-08-27T19:54:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/translation\/?post_type=profile&#038;p=1473"},"modified":"2025-11-21T09:27:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-21T14:27:07","slug":"margaret-litvin","status":"publish","type":"profile","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/translation\/profile\/margaret-litvin\/","title":{"rendered":"Margaret Litvin"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Margaret Litvin is associate professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature. Her work as a teacher, translator, and writer aims to help people understand how stories, ideas, and human beings grow and change when they move across languages and cultures. Her first book, <a href=\"https:\/\/press.princeton.edu\/titles\/9582.html\"><em>Hamlet&#8217;s Arab Journey: Shakespeare&#8217;s Prince and Nasser&#8217;s Ghost<\/em><\/a> (Princeton UP, 2011), traced translations and adaptations of Shakespeare\u2019s <em>Hamlet<\/em> in 20<sup>th<\/sup>-century Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, discovering that to understand the Arab <em>Hamlet<\/em> tradition meant engaging with source texts as diverse as French plays, British essays, and Russian films. Her current work explores two other areas of transregional cultural flows: Arab-Russian literary ties in the long 20<sup>th<\/sup> century, and contemporary Arab\/ic theatre for global audiences.<\/p>\n<p>Experiences of translating and being translated have shaped Litvin\u2019s life and career. Born in Moscow, USSR, she <a href=\"https:\/\/marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org\/an-ex-soviet-jew-looks-at-syrian-refugees-and-america-by-margaret-litvin\/\">immigrated<\/a> to the United States with her family in 1979 and has studied French, Italian, Spanish, Haitian Creole, Arabic, Swedish, and German. Her project on Arab-Russian ties (working title: <em>Another East: Arab Writers, Moscow Dreams<\/em>) led her to translate <a href=\"https:\/\/press.uchicago.edu\/ucp\/books\/book\/distributed\/I\/bo38690014.html\"><em>Ice<\/em><\/a>, Egyptian writer Sonallah Ibrahim\u2019s 2011 novel set in Moscow (Seagull Publishing, 2019) and an <a href=\"https:\/\/www.jstor.org\/stable\/26494280?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents\">essay<\/a> by Syrian filmmaker Mohamad Malas. <em>Hamlet\u2019s Arab Journey <\/em>appeared in Soha Sebaie\u2019s Arabic translation from Egypt\u2019s National Center for Translation in 2017; meanwhile, Litvin co-edited (with Marvin Carlson) and co-translated a companion anthology, <a href=\"https:\/\/thesegalcenter.org\/publications\/books\/four-arab-hamlet-plays\/\"><em>Four Arab Hamlet Plays<\/em><\/a> (2016), one play from which has received a <a href=\"https:\/\/pma.cornell.edu\/hamlet-wakes-late\">full production<\/a> at Cornell University; another US theatre company has <a href=\"http:\/\/arabianshakespearefestival.org\/2017\/08\/23\/get-your-tickets-for-asfs-hamlet\/\">dramatized<\/a> her findings on the Arab <em>Hamlet<\/em> tradition. She is also co-editor of the essay collection <a href=\"http:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/title\/HennesseyArab\"><em>Shakespeare &amp; the Arab World<\/em><\/a> (Berghahn, 2019)<em>. <\/em>Her research on Arab\/ic theatre for mixed and non-Arabic-speaking audiences (working title: <em>Sindbad\u2019s Raft, Houdini\u2019s Cage: Arabic Theatre in the New World Market<\/em>) inspired her to translate part of Malm\u00f6-based Iraqi playwright Karim Rashed\u2019s play <a href=\"https:\/\/www.asymptotejournal.com\/drama\/karim-rashed-i-came-to-see-you\/\"><em>I Came to See You<\/em><\/a> from Arabic and Swedish.<\/p>\n<p>Litvin has twice taught the BU Literary Translation Seminar, an experience whose splendors (not miseries) she described in a 2014 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wordswithoutborders.org\/dispatches\/article\/between-love-and-justice-teaching-literary-translation-at-boston-university\">essay<\/a> for Words without Borders. Her other BU courses, including \u201cGlobal Shakespeares\u201d and \u201c1001 Nights in the World Literary Imagination,\u201d foreground translation and adaptation issues and feature activities such as a mock-Translators\u2019 Debate where students role-play Husain Haddawy, Sir Richard Burton, Edward Lane, and Antoine Galland. She welcomes students translating drama, fiction, and literary non-fiction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9557,"template":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/translation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/1473"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/translation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/translation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/profile"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/translation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9557"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/translation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/1473\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4278,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/translation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/1473\/revisions\/4278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/translation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}