Award-winning translator Ellen Elias-Bursac recently had the chance to talk with Serbian writer and translator David Albahari about Globetrotter, her latest translation of one of Albahari’s novels. Ellen Elias-Bursac: How did you come up with the idea for the trilogy of Snow Man, Bait, and Globetrotter? Did you design the three
We had the chance to sit down with prolific translator Marian Schwartz to talk about her latest translation of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. She touches on the joys and challenges of Tolstoy as well as his lesser-known witty side. Yale University Press: Anna Karenina is a seminal work in literature. How
Nina Howe— The experience of editing the book, A Voice Still Heard, a selection of essays by my late father Irving Howe, was for me an exploration into my father’s life outside the family home. My father was a private person; he did not talk very much about his childhood
We had the privilege of sitting down to talk with Mark Polizzotti, who, among other things, has recently translated a trio of novellas from Nobel Prize–winner Patrick Modiano, Suspended Sentences, which publishes today. In our conversation, we talk about Modiano, the Nobel Prize, the art of translation, and the joy of
Mark Polizzotti has translated more than forty books from French, including the newly released Suspended Sentences by this year’s Nobel laureate in literature, Patrick Modiano. Mark wrote a lovely commentary on translating Modiano for the Yale Books Unbound blog. Mark is also the publisher and editor in chief at The Metropolitan Museum of
Paul Barber— On November 8, we celebrate the birthday of Bram Stoker. Stoker’s novel Dracula, published in 1897, had a tremendous influence on vampire-novels although, like other fiction of this sort, it owed little to the folk-beliefs on which it was based. The vampire lore was a belief among peasants
Mark Polizzotti— At first blush, the qualities suggested by Patrick Modiano’s fictions do not shout “Nobel.” Unlike Sartre (the laureate malgre lui), with his grand philosophical pronouncements, or France’s previous honoree, the famously peripatetic J. M. G. Le Clezio, Modiano tends to keep to himself, in narratives that are often
The first edition of Herman Melville’s classic novel Moby-Dick came out in London as The Whale on this day in 1851. But what makes Moby-Dick, or any text, a classic and what do we mean when we call it one? Denis Donoghue, author of The American Classics, shares his insights on appreciation and interpretation in
In the previous installments (part one, part two) of Danuta Borchardt‘s reflections on translating Trans-Atlantyk, she articulated why the variant of Polish Witold Gombrowicz used in the novel was so difficult to render in English. After considerable research and experimentation, she hit upon an approach that enabled her to translate the archaisms and idiosyncrasies
Shortly before his death in 1837, Giacomo Leopardi, a prolific Italian writer, translator, and thinker, began to organize a small, thematic collection of his writings in an attempt to give structure to his philosophical musings. This collection, culled from his 4,500-page diary, Zibaldone, provides a fascinating introduction to the arguments