translation
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Stories That Must Be Told
To read Alejandro Zambra is to engage with someone who writes as though the burden of history were upon him and no one else — the history of his country of Chile, of literature, and of humanity’s shared experience. You…
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Lost in Translation
Three Percent, a resource for international literature at the University of Rochester, derives its name from the fact that about 3 percent of all the books published in the U.S. every year are translations. But the bulk of these are…
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Laughing Again After Charlie Hebdo
While the firemen were carrying me on a wheeled office chair out of the conference room, I found myself floating over the bodies of my dead colleagues, Bernard, Tignous, Cabu, Georges, bodies that my rescuers were stepping over or around,…
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The Man Who Brings Us France
A profile on Arthur Goldhammer, who has translated over 100 books from French to English. As a translator, Goldhammer tries to find a pragmatic middle-ground between literalism and freestyle. The goal is to be faithful to the contents of a…
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The Translator as a God
Actually, I would compare the translator to a God—but unlike some false gods, he does respond to your prayers… Electric Literature interviews Alex Epstein, the author behind the True Legends app, about his experience collaborating with other artists and working…
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How to Read and Write Indian Literature
Anyone who simplifies a nation’s discourse misreads that nation. When you’re reading the texts of a recently created nation like India, which was only founded in 1947, you must know the political, historical, and linguistic backdrop, or you will miswrite…
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The Companionship of Books
For Words without Borders, Can Xue describes her father’s “serious books” and how having them as companions led her to a “genuine spiritual pursuit.”
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A Loss of Translation
The mismatch between quality and recognition in the world of translated fiction and nonfiction is surely more extreme than in any category of literature, and while this category has a growing number of great advocates, it deserves to have them…
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Ancient Pulp Fiction
A new English translation of ancient Arabian stories contains monsters, jinn, and some rather promiscuous princes. Elizabeth Lowry discusses the collection and its relationship to modern pulp fiction for the Guardian.
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Fairy Tales Uncut
The Guardian looks at a new English translation of the first edition of the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales and finds stories that are much less child-friendly than the ones we know today.
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Translated Books in the USA
For the New Yorker, Vauhini Vara wonders if the Nobel Prize is necessary for foreign authors to be successful in the United States, as large publishing companies hesitate to release translated works that are “unlikely to become a big, or even moderate,…
