Posts filed under 'PEN Translation Committee'

Staging Translation: An Interview with Larissa Kyzer

March 5, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Timmer Harvey

When you translate someone whose work and style really meshes with your own sensibilities, it’s this all-enveloping blanket . . .

Larissa Kyzer is a translator’s translator, which is to say that in addition to her award-winning work as an Icelandic to English literary translator, Kyzer has firmly immersed herself in the international translation community, and is dedicated to creating space within the industry to “actively invite more people, more voices in.” As co-chair of the PEN Translation Committee, in 2019, Kyzer launched the Jill! reading series, a bi-monthly event highlighting the work of women and non-binary translators and authors. Following Larissa’s recent stint as Translator-in-Residence at Princeton University, we corresponded about the origins of Jill!, translator visibility, sneaking Icelandic words into English texts, and why translating Kristín Eiríksdóttir’s outstanding novel, A Fist or a Heart, felt like a “gift.”

—Sarah Timmer Harvey, January 2020

Sarah Timmer Harvey (STH): Your translation of Kristín Eiríksdóttir’s novel, A Fist or a Heart, was awarded the American-Scandinavian Foundation’s Nadia Christensen Translation Prize in 2019, and was included in Library Journal’s Best Books of 2019. What drew you to Kristín’s writing?

Larissa Kyzer (LK): Although I’d long been a fan of Kristín’s work, getting the opportunity to translate it feels more like kismet. I’d read her first novel, Hvítfeld (White Fur) as a student at the University of Iceland—it’s still one of my favorite Icelandic books—and I also loved her collection Doris deyr (Doris Dies) so much that early on in my translation studies, I attempted to translate her short story “Evelyn Hates Her Name” just for the fun of it. At the time, however, that was still beyond my capabilities. For one, my language skills weren’t up to snuff yet, but more than that, I also just really had no idea how to even get started translating something in earnest.

Fast forward a few years to when I was finally starting to get my professional feet under me and was asked by the Icelandic publisher Forlagið to translate a sample of A Fist or a Heart for the upcoming Frankfurter Buchmesse. The sample really caught people’s attention, and I was lucky that Gabriella Page-Fort at AmazonCrossing was willing to take the leap and allow me, still an emerging translator, to translate the whole book. Since then, I’ve translated a couple of Kristín’s poems, as well as two short stories—including, I’m proud to say, that same short story that not so long ago felt like a nearly impossible challenge! READ MORE…

Translator’s Profile: Susan Bernofsky

August 13, 2015  |  in Interviews, Translator's Profile  |  by Katrine Øgaard Jensen

Q&A with Susan Bernofsky, translator from the German and Director of Literary Translation at Columbia University.

Susan Bernofsky directs the literary translation program in the School of the Arts MFA Program in Writing at Columbia University. She has translated over twenty books, including seven by the great Swiss-German modernist author Robert Walser, Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Hesse’s Siddhartha and, most recently, The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck. Her many prizes and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship this year, as well as the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize and the Hermann Hesse Translation Prize. She blogs about translation at www.translationista.net.

***

Asymptote: Describe your current/most recent project. Why is it cool? What should we know about it?

Susan Bernofsky: I’m working on a gorgeous and bizarre novel about polar bears by Yoko Tawada called ETUDES IN SNOW. It’s a three-generation story inspired by the short, tragic life of Knut, the baby polar bear born in the Berlin zoo in 2006, but that’s just the jumping-off point for her novel. It’s really a book about identity (national, species, etc.) All the main characters in the book are polar bears, and are described in their physicality as polar bears, but at the same time they move in human society, without any acknowledgment that there might be a contradiction here. The grandmother character, born in the Soviet Union, becomes a writer. As an author of polar bear extraction, she’s an ethnic minority. She later emigrates to Canada, from where her daughter returns to Europe, landing in East Germany, where she takes a job at a circus and experiences the fall of the Berlin Wall. It’s a funny, sad, moving book.

READ MORE…