John Timothy Wixted on The Poetry of Yuan Haowen

John Timothy Wixted explores the themes of loss and cultural legacy in Yuan Haowen’s (1190–1257) poetry—one of the greatest poets in Chinese literary history.

April 8, 2025

Carlo Acevedo and Kelsi Vanada on Writing and Translating Day’s Fortune/Fortuna del día

Kelsi Vanada and Carlo Acevedo offer insight into the writing and translation process and the value this bilingual edition brings to U.S. Spanish speakers.

March 10, 2025

Illuminating The Running Flame

Fang Fang in Conversation with Michael Berry

More than twenty years after its initial publication in Chinese, The Running Flame is finally available in English translation. As the novel reaches a new group of readers, translator Michael Berry revisits the origins of the story with author Fang Fang, who in this interview, reflects on her work and the place of women in contemporary China.

November 6, 2024

Lilit Žekulin Thwaites on Translating Crossing Waters by Luisa Etxenike

Lilit Žekulin Thwaites is an award-winning Australian literary translator of novels, short stories, poetry, and essays. Luisa Etxenike is an acclaimed author from the Basque Country whose works offer insightful, moving perspectives on unorthodox topics. They recently collaborated on an...

October 1, 2024

Lucina Schell on “Sangre” by Mercedes Roffé

Lucina Schell reflects on “Sangre” (“Blood”), a five-line poem by Argentine poet Mercedes Roffé that carries the emotional weight of a nation’s unresolved past.

September 24, 2024

Lawrence Schimel on Translating Music for Bamboo Strings by Carlos Pintado

In “The Challenge,” Cuban-American poet Carlos Pintado writes, in English translation by Lawrence Schimel: The distance between the rat and myself is minimal. She looks at the house from her smallness; I look at the house from my majesty. …...

September 19, 2024

Jenny Burton on Translating an Excerpt from Ansilta Grizas’s Un temporal

An excerpt of the Ansilta Grizas’s 103-page memoir Un temporal, originally published in Spanish by Ed. Entropía, was included in the anthology titled Constellation: Latin American Voices in Translation, recently published by Sundial House, a distribution partner of Columbia University...

September 17, 2024

Janet Poole on Translating Ch’oe Myŏngik

When Ch’oe Myŏngik was writing short fiction in the mid-twentieth century, he was known as a master of the detail. While other Korean writers of the time were cranking out dozens of pages of writing per week, often for serialised...

September 10, 2024

Sheela Mahadevan on Translating Ari Gautier’s Lakshmi’s Secret Diary

L akshmi’s Secret Diary is a translation of contemporary Indian Francophone novel Carnet secret de Lakshmi by writer and poet Ari Gautier, who is from Pondicherry, a city in South India that was once the capital of French India. The...

September 6, 2024

Tiffany Troy on Translating Santiago Acosta

As a literary critic, I often begin my interviews with: “What is the act of literary translation to you?” Translators often respond with some version of the sentiment that translation is an act of radical activism. That is all well...

August 20, 2024

Ilze Duarte on Marília Arnaud and The Book of Affects

Marilia Arnaud, author of O livro dos afetos (The Book of Affects), was born in Campina Grande, in the northeastern state of Paraíba, and lives in João Pessoa, the capital city. Arnaud first became known in Brazil as a short...

August 13, 2024

Language Haunted by Sex?

Armine Kotin Mortimer

Armine Kotin Mortimer, who translated Dostoyevsky in the Face of Death by Julia Kristeva, discussed what he considered when translating the book’s subtitle “Language Haunted by Sex.