Translation
Story Stream
On Meeting Strangers August 08, 2025
Somewhere on the southern edge of Greece, on the island of Rhodes, a tall man with a sunburned face and a body as if sculpted by centuries of salt and wind stood at the helm of a little, ridiculous-looking steel boat called Yellow Submarine, advertis...
Women in Translation Month Recommendations August 08, 2025
A short post recommending some books!August is Women in Translation Month:“The Women in Translation movement (WIT) is a global effort centered around the idea that women who write in languages other than English deserve to be widely read and apprecia...
The Semiotics of Girlblogging August 07, 2025
FANTASY CANNIBALIZES REALITY in Olivia Kan-Sperling’s first full-length novel, Little Pink Book, a delirious, dream-addled sojourn through the Orientalist daydreams of Limei, an introverted barista at a café in Shanghai. Limei spends her days at the ...
Translation and Taste July 03, 2025
Translation suggests that there are many ways of being good—but no sure method. A sentence in a foreign language can be translated successfully into our own by a number of different English sentences, none of which will replicate the original’s liter...
On Vigdis Hjorth’s “If Only” July 02, 2025
Love drives you crazy. What’s falling in love but losing yourself to someone else, crashing your world headlong into theirs, destroying them both and creating something new? This pell-mell collision, the madness of love, which never ceases to shift, ...
Poets on Translation: Otherwise the Same June 09, 2025
Who’s to blame for what Damion Searls, in The Philosophy of Translation, calls “the annoying claim that translation is impossible”? Despite all evidence to the contrary, the notion that some things (particularly poetry) are untranslatable is so preva...
Crushing Banalities June 04, 2025
2018, Germany. A bungalow, with anthracite walls and a flat roof. Jerome Daimler’s parents purchased it. They’re divorced now. He lives there alone. The light outside is always muted, gray with little pockets of soft blue. He is constantly renting Te...
On Mathias Énard’s “The Deserters” June 03, 2025
The fifty-three-year-old French novelist Mathias Énard is most distinguished by the many prizes he has won, more numerous as they are than his books. They have certified him the best within various spheres, ranging from French, French or German, Fran...
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), ...
