Category: National Translation Month

September 27, 2019

Reading List: In Tribute to the Late Donald Keene

Donald Keene played a leading role in cementing Japanese literary studies in the United States and other English-speaking communities. His dedication to Japanese culture and faithful translations of fiction and diaries introduced the world to talented writers and shined a new...

September 26, 2019

Sarah Vitali on Necropolis

“Khodasevich’s crystalline, mordant prose is skilfully handled by Sarah Vitali, who has done justice to the text and supplemented it with a wealth of endnotes that illuminate its more allusive and evasive moments. The edition also benefits from a stylish...

September 25, 2019

Sandra Smith on Becoming a Literary Translator

“Despite fleeing first Tsarist Russia and then Nazi-occupied France, Jacques Schiffrin succeeded in being a major literary influence on two continents, establishing first the best edition of French classics and then a key publishing house in New York which would...

September 24, 2019

Donald Keene on Translating Japanese Soldiers’ Diaries

“Gratifying… picaresque…. The pathos at the heart of Keene’s lovely and gracious memoir, and perhaps of his extraordinary life, emanates from this very human limitation: we cannot live in and love two worlds at once.” ~Roland Kelts, Bookforum on Chronicles...

September 22, 2019

Reading List: Crime, Deception and Punishment in Translation

We are continuing to explore literary translations as part of National Translation Month with this reading list of books that delve into themes of crime, deception and punishment. •  •  •  •  •  • From the European Perspectives: A Series in Social...

September 21, 2019

Susanne Fusso on Nikolai Nikolaevich and Camouflage and Yuz Aleshkovsky’s Contribution to Russian Literature

“Joseph Brodsky once noted that Aleshkovsky had a Mozartian ear for the Russian language, and Nikolai Nikolaevich (1970), his first novel, as well as Camouflage (1978), his fourth – written the year before the author emigrated permanently to the US – are indeed virtuoso...

September 20, 2019

José Vergara on Teaching One of the World’s Worst Detective Stories

“Sasha Sokolov’s Between Dog and Wolf, delivered in Alexander Boguslawski’s masterful translation, comprises a daring act of immersion into the depths of language that results in semantic spasms of the great Russian literary body. The highly experimental novel, which unquestionably...

September 20, 2019

Delving Down into Argot: Susan Emanuel on Translating Vice, Crime, and Poverty

“This is a lively and fun read. More than tracing the evolution of living conditions of the poor and indigent, Vice, Crime, and Poverty also represents an important contribution to the histoire des mentalités, telling us how different eras viewed the poor in...

September 20, 2019

Emil Draitser on Redemption and How the Soviet Union Attempted to Cover-Up the Holocaust

“Redemption is awash with brutal truths, rude awakenings and painful self-discoveries. Gorenstein doesn’t make it easy for his reader: His forbidding theme is the aftermath of the Holocaust — the aftershock of ‘ineluctable, planned murder’ — and his protagonist is...

September 19, 2019

Mark Teeuwen and Kate Wildman Nakai on Lust, Commerce, and Corruption

“What better way to explore the riches of Japanese society before its “opening” to the West than through this masterful translation of one of the most colorful social commentaries of the time? Student and scholar alike will treasure this volume.”...

September 19, 2019

Q&A: Olivier Wierviorka on The Resistance in Western Europe, 1940-1945

“Olivier Wieviorka treats the resistance in Western Europe as a multinational coalition. Anglo-Americans supplied arms and funding to resistance groups on the continent, and Resistance movements in turn aided in the Allied war effort. It was part tug-of-war, résistants striving to maintain...

September 18, 2019

Dominique Kalifa on the Translation of Vice, Crime, and Poverty

“Dominique Kalifa is one of the best French cultural historians of his generation and a worthy successor to Alain Corbin at the Sorbonne. Vice, Crime, and Poverty examines the urban ‘underworld,’ not in the twentieth-century sense of organized crime but as an...