Literary Translation Clinics

A series of knowledge-sharing open sessions for literary translators and appreciators of translated works from all backgrounds and experience levels.

The Literary Translation Clinics were hosted by members of the translator collective, Cedilla & Co. Each one-hour clinic featured a presentation or conversation followed by a Q&A. Topics ranged from questions and theories of craft to submissions, contracts, and other practical concerns, always with an eye to literary translation as a profession.

Featured

Featured Guests

Kareem James Abu-Zeid

Kareem James Abu-Zeid

Kareem James Abu-Zeid, PhD, is a translator of authors from across the Arab world who translates from Arabic, French, and German. His work has earned him an NEA translation grant, PEN Center USA’s Translation Award, Poetry magazine’s translation prize, residencies from the Lannan Foundation and the Banff Centre, a Fulbright Fellowship (Germany), and a CASA Fellowship (Egypt), among other honors. His most recent translation is Najwan Darwish’s Exhausted on the Cross (NYRB Poets, 2021). He is also the author of The Poetics of Adonis and Yves Bonnefoy: Poetry as Spiritual Practice. The online hub for his work is www.kareemjamesabuzeid.com.
Sean Gasper Bye

Sean Gasper Bye

Sean Gasper Bye is a translator of Polish literature, including books by Lidia Ostałowska, Filip Springer, Małgorzata Szejnert, and Szczepan Twardoch. A native of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, he studied modern languages at University College London and international studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies. He spent five years as Literature and Humanities Curator at the Polish Cultural Institute New York. He is a winner of the Asymptote Close Approximations Prize and a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowship.
Heather Cleary

Heather Cleary

Heather Cleary has translated books of fiction by Betina González, María Ospina, Roque Larraquy, and Sergio Chejfec, among others, as well as non-fiction and poetry. She holds a PhD in Latin American and Iberian Cultures from Columbia University and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. She served on the jury of the 2020 NBA for Translated Literature.
Katrina Dodson

Katrina Dodson

Katrina Dodson is the translator of The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector, winner of the PEN Translation Prize and other awards. She is currently adapting her Lispector translation journal into a book and translating the 1928 Brazilian modernist classic Macunaíma: The Hero with No Character by Mário de Andrade (New Directions). Her writing has appeared in the Paris Review, The Believer, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. Dodson holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, and teaches translation at Columbia University.
Edward Gauvin

Edward Gauvin

A 2021 Guggenheim fellow, Edward Gauvin has translated in various fields from film to fiction, with a personal focus on contemporary comics (BD) and post-Surrealist literatures of the fantastic. His work has been shortlisted for several major prizes and awards. He has received fellowships and residencies from the NEA, PEN America, the Fulbright program, the Lannan Foundation, and the French and Belgian governments. As a translation advocate, he has written widely, spoken at universities and festivals, and taught at the Bread Loaf Translation Conference. The translator of over 400 graphic novels, he is a contributing editor for comics at Words Without Borders.
Anton Hur

Anton Hur

Anton Hur translates Korean literature and has won PEN translation grants transatlantically. A graduate of the Korea University College of Law, he has published translations with Grove Atlantic, Tilted Axis, Honford Star, Pegasus Books, and others. He currently divides his time between Seoul and Songdo.

Photo credit: Anton Hur
Chenxin Jiang

Chenxin Jiang

Chenxin Jiang translates from Italian, German, and Chinese. Recent translations include Tears of Salt: A Doctor’s Story by Pietro Bartolo and Lidia Tilotta (Norton), shortlisted for the 2019 Italian Prose in Translation Award. She has also been a recipient of the Words Without Borders/American Academy of Poets prize as well as a PEN/Heim translation grant, and in 2019, she was a judge for the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize. She’s a member of the Third Coast Translators Collective and a Board member for the American Literary Translators Association.
Madhu H. Kaza

Madhu H. Kaza

Born in Andhra Pradesh, India, Madhu H. Kaza is a writer, translator, artist and educator based in New York City. She is a translator of the feminist Telugu writers Volga and Vimala. Political Stories, her co-translation of a collection of Vimala’s fiction, was published in 2007 in India; other translations and original writing have appeared in Gulf Coast, Guernica, Waxwing, Chimurenga, The Encyclopedia Project, Two Lines, and more. She recently edited Kitchen Table Translation, a volume that explores the connections between migration and translation and which features immigrant, diasporic, and POC translators. She was the founding director of the Bard Microcollege at Brooklyn Public Library and currently serves as Faculty Advisor to the program. She also teaches in the MFA program at Columbia University.
Thierry Kehou

Thierry Kehou

Thierry Kehou is a writer and translator from French (with a focus on Cameroon). His working translation of Francis Bebey’s novella Three Little Shoeshiners has received support from the Breadloaf Translators’ Conference and was longlisted for the 2020 John Dryden Translation Competition. Currently, he is translating a collection of linked short stories and poems by Bebey.
Sora Kim-Russell

Sora Kim-Russell

Sora Kim-Russell’s recent publications include Pyun Hye-young’s The Law of Lines, Hwang Sok-yong’s At Dusk, and Kim Un-su’s The Plotters. She has taught literary translation at the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference (2018), LTI Korea, and Ewha Womans University. Her forthcoming publications include two cotranslations: The Prisoner by Hwang Sok-yong and On the Origin of Species and Other Stories by Boyoung Kim.
Bruna Dantas Lobato

Bruna Dantas Lobato

Bruna Dantas Lobato is a Brazilian writer and literary translator based in New York City, and Digital Marketing and Communications Coordinator at Words Without Borders. Her translation of Caio Fernando Abreu’s Moldy Strawberries (PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant 2019) is forthcoming from Archipelago Books in April 2022, and her translation of Giovana Madalosso’s Tokyo Suite is forthcoming from Europa Editions in the fall of 2022.
Rajiv Mohabir

Rajiv Mohabir

Rajiv Mohabir is a poet and translator of I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara (1916) (Kaya Press 2019) which received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant Award and the 2020 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the American Academy of Poets. Currently he is an Assistant Professor of poetry in the MFA program at Emerson College, translations editor at Waxwing Journal.
Mui Poopoksakul

Mui Poopoksakul

Mui Poopoksakul is a lawyer-turned-translator with a special interest in contemporary Thai literature. Her translations include three story collections: The Sad Part Was and Moving Parts, both by Prabda Yoon, and Arid Dreams by Duanwad Pimwana. She is also the translator of Pimwana’s novel Bright. Currently, she is translating a novel by Saneh Sangsuk. A native of Bangkok who spent two decades in the U.S., she now lives in Berlin, Germany.
Allison Markin Powell

Allison Markin Powell

Allison Markin Powell has been awarded grants from English PEN and the NEA, and the 2020 PEN America Translation Prize for The Ten Loves of Nishino by Hiromi Kawakami. Forthcoming translations include Lady Joker by Kaoru Takamura, co-translated with Marie Iida, and Black Box by Shiori Ito. She was the co-organizer and co-host of the “Translating the Future” conference, served as cochair of the PEN America Translation Committee and currently represents the committee on PEN’s Board of Trustees, and she maintains the database Japanese Literature in English.
Alta L. Price

Alta L. Price

Alta L. Price runs a publishing consultancy specialized in literature and nonfiction texts on art, architecture, design, and culture. A recipient of the Gutekunst Prize, she translates from Italian and German into English. Her translation of Juli Zeh’s novel New Year (World Editions, 2021) came out last month, and her forthcoming translations include Mithu Sanyal’s novel Identitti (Astra House, 2022).

Photo Credit: Donnelly Marks
Aaron Robertson

Aaron Robertson

Aaron Robertson is a writer, translator, and editor. His translation of Igiaba Scego’s novel Beyond Babylon (Two Lines Press, 2019) was shortlisted for multiple awards, including the PEN Translation Prize and the National Translation Award. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Detroit Metro Times, the Nation, Foreign Policy, n+1, and more. He is working on his first book, a nonfiction account of African-American utopian traditions.
Julia Sanches

Julia Sanches

Julia Sanches is a translator of Spanish- , Portuguese-language, and Catalan authors, among them Geovani Martins, Dolores Reyes, Eva Baltasar, and Claudia Hernández.
Jennifer Shyue

Jennifer Shyue

Jennifer Shyue is a translator focusing on contemporary Cuban and Asian-Peruvian writers. Her work has been supported by fellowships and grants from Cornell University’s Institute for Comparative Modernities, Fulbright, Princeton University, and the University of Iowa. Her translation of Vice-royal-ties by Julia Wong Kcomt is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse’s Señal chapbook series. She can be found at shyue.co.
Jeremy Tiang

Jeremy Tiang

Jeremy Tiang has translated novels by Yan Ge, Zhang Yueran, Chan Ho-Kei, Yeng Pway Ngon, Su Wei-Chen, Geling Yan and Li Er, among others. He also writes and translates plays. His novel State of Emergency won the Singapore Literature Prize in 2018.
Alex Zucker

Alex Zucker

Alex Zucker’s translation of The Movement by Petra Hůlová was published last month by World Editions in the US and the UK. His forthcoming translations include the novels A Sensitive Person by Jáchym Topol (Margellos World Republic of Letters at Yale University Press), The Lake by Bianca Bellová (Parthian Books), and essays in The Selected Writings of Jan Patočka: Care for the Soul (Bloomsbury), by the 20th-century Czech philosopher Jan Patočka. More info at www.alexjzucker.com.
Jeffrey Zuckerman

Jeffrey Zuckerman

Jeffrey Zuckerman is a translator from French of authors ranging from Ananda Devi and Shenaz Patel to Jean Genet and Hervé Guibert. He has been a finalist for the TA First Translation Prize and the French-American Foundation Translation Prize, and has been awarded a PEN/Heim translation grant and the French Voices Grand Prize. He is based in New York City.

Photo credit: Carl de Souza