Tag literary translators

Stephen Mitchell on Translation and Beowulf

Stephen Mitchell— I backed into translation. As a young man at Yale Graduate School, dealing with a first heartbreak, I became fascinated with the Book of Job. What thrilled and perplexed me was a feeling that the poet who wrote it had seen something, had actually experienced the secret of

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An Interview with Author Arturo Fontaine by Translator Megan McDowell

We are pleased to release an exciting interview between Arturo Fontaine and Megan McDowell, author and translator respectively of La Vida Doble, which is now available to the English speaking world through Yale University Press’s Margellos World Republic of Letters series. In the interview, Fontaine and McDowell discuss what it

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Italian Author Claudio Magris to Tour the U.S.

Italian author and 2001 Erasmus Prize winner Claudio Magris is touring the U.S. this fall to present his most recent novel Blindly, expertly translated by Anne Milano Appel and published earlier this year as part of  Yale University Press’s Margellos World Republic of Letters series – a series committed to making the work

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Lost Without Translation: Margaret Sayers Peden on Work as a Translator

Margaret Sayers Peden, translator of Fernando de Rojas’ fifteenth-century classic La Celestina, among dozens of other books, considers here the joys and pleasures, challenges and frustrations of literary translation. Often regarded as the first European novel and second only to Don Quixote in its importance to Spanish literature, Celestina is

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Lost Without Translation: Ellen Elias-Bursać on “A Marriage Made in Translation”

Ellen Elias-Bursać, editor of Vlada Stojiljkovic‘s translation of Ranko Marinkovic‘s 1965 novel Cyclops, writes on the special and playful relationship formed between author and translator by their respective attentions to wit, banter, and humor, along with excerpts from the text. Like many previously published titles in the Margellos World Republic of

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Lost Without Translation: Peter Cole on The Poetry of Kabbalah

The latest Margellos World Republic of Letters interview features acclaimed poet and translator Peter Cole on The Poetry of Kabbalah, the first English-language collection of poems from the Kabbalistic tradition. In the excerpt below, Cole discusses the history, culture, language, and identities that have shaped over a millennium of tradition in

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Lost Without Translation: Fady Joudah on the Poetry of Ghassan Zaqtan

Fady Joudah first became associated with Yale University Press in 2007 when he was awarded the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize by then-judge Louise Glück, and the subsequent publication of his first volume of poetry, The Earth in the Attic, in April 2008. He returns to our list this

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