literature in translation

  • The Rumpus Interview with Raphael Cormack

    The Rumpus Interview with Raphael Cormack

    Raphael Cormack discusses The Book of Khartoum: A City in Short Fiction, a collection of short stories he co-edited and translated, the editorial process, and the responsibilities that accompany translating writing.

  • Translation Grows Trendy

    Translated literature is as much a product of the translator as it is the writer. After years of in the doldrums, literature in translation is making a resurgence as the art and skill has modernized. The Financial Times takes a look…

  • Less Like a Communication

    This poetry was a poetry meant to be read loudly, breathlessly, full-throttle, full of sonic energy and internal rhyme. It felt less like a communication from a speaker to a reader and more like sheet music for a reader to…

  • Poems from Guantanamo

    In 2010, French poet Frank Smith took the transcripts of the initial combatant status review tribunals from Guantanamo and turned them into a book of poetry. The New Inquiry looks at Vanessa Place’s recent English translation of Smith’s Guantanamo.

  • Bringing Tolstoy to the West

    More people were reading Tolstoy than any other author in translation at the beginning of the 20th century, but as late as the 1880s, few non-Russians had even heard of him. Translators were deterred partly because of the length of…