Lilit Žekulin Thwaites on Translating Crossing Waters by Luisa Etxenike

Translator Lilit Thwaites discusses translating Basque author Luisa Etxenike’s novel Crossing Waters—a story of three trauma survivors finding hope.

October 1, 2024

Lucina Schell on “Sangre” by Mercedes Roffé

Lucina Schell reflects on “Sangre” (“Blood”), a five-line poem by Argentine poet Mercedes Roffé that carries the emotional weight of a nation’s unresolved past.

September 24, 2024

Lawrence Schimel on Translating Music for Bamboo Strings by Carlos Pintado

In “The Challenge,” Cuban-American poet Carlos Pintado writes, in English translation by Lawrence Schimel: The distance between the rat and myself is minimal. She looks at the house from her smallness; I look at the house from my majesty. …...

September 19, 2024

Jenny Burton on Translating an Excerpt from Ansilta Grizas’s Un temporal

An excerpt of the Ansilta Grizas’s 103-page memoir Un temporal, originally published in Spanish by Ed. Entropía, was included in the anthology titled Constellation: Latin American Voices in Translation, recently published by Sundial House, a distribution partner of Columbia University...

September 17, 2024

Janet Poole on Translating Ch’oe Myŏngik

When Ch’oe Myŏngik was writing short fiction in the mid-twentieth century, he was known as a master of the detail. While other Korean writers of the time were cranking out dozens of pages of writing per week, often for serialised...

September 10, 2024

Sheela Mahadevan on Translating Ari Gautier’s Lakshmi’s Secret Diary

L akshmi’s Secret Diary is a translation of contemporary Indian Francophone novel Carnet secret de Lakshmi by writer and poet Ari Gautier, who is from Pondicherry, a city in South India that was once the capital of French India. The...

September 6, 2024

Tiffany Troy on Translating Santiago Acosta

As a literary critic, I often begin my interviews with: “What is the act of literary translation to you?” Translators often respond with some version of the sentiment that translation is an act of radical activism. That is all well...