Translation
Story Stream
Against High Brodernism February 24, 2025
AMERICANS CAN ONLY ACCEPT foreign literature once they have washed it with superlatives. Nothing less than a disinfectant exaltation—“masterpiece!” “genius!”—will do if the book is to be read. If you believe critics like me, every translated novel de...
The Superiority of Western Culture February 21, 2025
I’m not sure how it happened, but recently I found myself watching a Canadian musician on YouTube named Peter Pringle as he conducted a lament for Gilgamesh, the titular hero of the ancient epic. Wearing a yellow mock turtleneck, Pringle delivered th...
The Painter of Thought February 20, 2025
Michel de Montaigne is often upheld as a model of the examined life. In her introduction to What Do I Know? (the latest selection of Montaigne’s essays, translated by David Coward and published in 2023 by Pushkin Press), Yiyun Li writes: “For me, his...
On the Clock February 19, 2025
It is an unusual thing for Hollywood to walk back across the ground that Steven hath trod. Whole subjects become untouchable once Spielberg folds up his director’s chair. The era of truly epic shark films began and ended with Jaws. No more boulders w...
On Translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses February 17, 2025
Less than 150 lines into the first book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the world, created out of chaos when the poem begins, degenerates into widespread corruption, fraud, and treachery (mankind’s doing), and is subsequently devastated by a flood (Jupiter’...
The Art of Reading Like a Translator February 03, 2025
By just about any measure, Damion Searls, an American translator of German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch, is one of the leading practitioners of his art. He has translated the works of widely acknowledged masters (Hermann Hesse, Rainer Maria Rilke), ...
In Defense of Mimicry September 17, 2024
Translators are told over and over that they have to maintain fidelity, that they should not be unfaithful, that they should not take liberties with the original text. Reviews of translated books seldom even mention the translator—unless the translat...
Three Kafkaesque Novels from Around the World September 16, 2024
Recently, my friend Michael Barron emailed me with a book recommendation—Kadare’s The Palace of Dreams—and a question: was I still doing book recommendations on Counter Craft? I interview authors with new books out, but it has been a while since I wr...
The 2024 National Book Awards Longlist September 12, 2024
The New Yorker presents the longlists for Young People’s Literature, Translated Literature, Poetry, Fiction, and Nonfiction....
The Secret Agent September 11, 2024
Sadie Smith arrives in a French village with an impeccable referral for the anarcho-primitive commune based there. An American, she’s ostensibly on hand to translate into English the commune’s collectively authored handbook on how to secede from and ...
This Couple Reign in Russian Literature August 27, 2024
The first time Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translated a Russian novel together, it felt as though another man had joined their marriage: Dostoyevsky.“It was a mariage à trois,” Volokhonsky said over coffee at her and Pevear’s rambling apar...
On Some Recent Translator’s Notes August 21, 2024
In translation, the stakes are high and the compensation indubitably low. That the task, rewarding as it is under various scalpels, goes so unnoticed by lay-readers, explains my experience that translators are a pretty tight-knit group, braided with ...
The Genius of Translation July 31, 2024
Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody’s translations of Benjamin Fondane, the Romanian francophone poet-philosopher increasingly recognized as a vital, enduring figure of Jewish and world literature, and of Paul Valéry, a writer as significant to French letters a...
Trump, the Magic Candidate July 26, 2024
We keep looking at that photograph: Trump’s fist bump, his scowl, the blood on his ear. We who support Trump, and we who oppose him. We mock it. We regret it. We put it on T-shirts. We make it into memes. We don’t stop looking. It reminds me, in mood...
A Dangerous Drama in Paradise July 26, 2024
NBC has an age-old formula for its Olympics broadcasts: Crank up the tension, hype the world’s best athletes until they either win or crumble under pressure, and, in between, run dozens of tear-jerky athlete-backstory segments. Tie it all together wi...
The Salter Method July 25, 2024
A retrospective on Martin Amis in the Times of London has voiced a complaint made several times in recent years—that young male writers are at a disadvantage, today, not just because of declining numbers of men reading fiction (a complaint taken up i...
Proust in the Age of Retranslation July 24, 2024
How should translators — or any writers, for that matter — respond to their critics? The usual advice is quiet dignity: for certain distances to be kept so that a sense, however slight, of superiority might be implied. Some even urge writers not to b...
Everybody Gets a Star July 24, 2024
Since the dawn of civilization, mankind has desired to air grievances against those we felt have wronged us: This is not hyperbole, but fact. An almost 4,000-year-old cuneiform tablet from the ancient city of Ur gives us Nanni, who writes to copper d...
What the New York Times Missed July 17, 2024
Last week, The New York Times Book Review published a list of the “100 Best Books of the 21st Century.” (Well, so far, obviously. Why not just call it the best books of the last 25 years? Do they know something we don’t? Oh well.) To put it together,...
Fitzcarraldo Editions Makes Challenging Literature Chic July 02, 2024
For nearly a year after Jennifer Croft, a translator, sent a submission to Jacques Testard, a publisher in London, in the summer of 2015, the manuscript languished unread. Testard had launched Fitzcarraldo Editions the previous year, with the goal of...
