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
Today marks the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Adolphe Sax. Born in Dinant, Belgium, Sax became probably the most well-known inventor of musical brass-wind instruments in the nineteenth century. His posthumous reputation derives largely from the success of his eponymous saxophone, now one of the most recognized and influential
Richard Pells— October 30, 1938. The night before Halloween in America. After dinner, at 8:00 in the evening, Eastern Standard Time, families throughout the country gathered in their living rooms, as they usually did, to listen to the radio. At that hour, the highest-rated show on the radio was NBC’s
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
Brothers Allen and Wallace Shawn recently sat down to discuss the life of legendary composer, conductor, and author Leonard Bernstein. While most of us know him today for the spectacular scores he composed for The West Side Story, On The Waterfront, and A Quiet Place, few may not know his struggles as