Susan Bernofsky directs the program in literary translation at the Columbia University School of the Arts and has translated works by Robert Walser, Yoko Tawada, Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse, Jenny Erpenbeck, and Uljana Wolf. A Guggenheim, Cullman, and Berlin Prize fellow, she is currently at work on a new translation of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Her biography of Robert Walser, Clairvoyant of the Small, was a finalist for the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. Her translation of Yoko Tawada’s novel Paul Celan and the Transtibetan Angel is forthcoming in 2023 from New Directions.
Responsible for introducing American readers to One Hundred Years of Solitude and a large portion of the Latin American literary canon, award-winning translator Gregory Rabassa discusses the state of translation today and much more.