The Care that Goes into Translation: An Interview with Lisa Hayden

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A central theme of the novel Laurus is that time is a spiral. Events and themes recur throughout history, but each time with a slight variation. The structure of the work, by Russian author Eugene Vodolazkin, mirrors that premise. Scenes and pages reference and reshape each other constantly. Though

There Are Places I Remember: on the Fine Line Between Fiction and Memoir in Translation

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Sometimes it feels as if I’m not merely translating people’s stories into English, but helping people preserve their own lives, turning them into internationally comprehendible keepsakes. For every two books of pure fiction that I translate, there is a third that is not exactly a memoir, not exactly a

Step Inside My Skin and Dance Around in It: On Literary Translation

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For days, while I revised my translation, I looked for the right words to tell the protagonist’s mother that he’s terminally ill. Even though the protagonist’s life is nothing like my own, I couldn’t help but climb inside his skin and walk around in it.

To Write a Page in Someone’s Shoes: On Translation and the Experience of Empathy

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I translate something almost every day. Five or six days a week, you can find me in the process of drafting, editing, or proofreading a translation, clicking back and forth between the original and my translation, comparing and contrasting.

Out With the Old and in With the Ancient: The Bible as Literature in Translation

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It isn’t only Israeli politics and government agenda that hang on the narratives of the Bible—the Hebrew language is profoundly steeped in biblical passages, references, and turns of phrase.

Duly Noted: on Footnotes and their Place in Translation

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When I was translating Some Day, by Shemi Zarhin, my first published translation which came out with New Vessel Press in 2013, the question of footnotes was constantly on my mind. There was so much to that book, set in Israel, that an English reader wouldn’t know about.

From Swaddles to Slang: Creative Problem Solving in Translation and Motherhood

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In late February I finished up the translation of a novel. In mid-March my son was born. Caring for a baby is not all too different than dealing with a challenging translation, though granted the hours are less convenient and the boss often poses unreasonable demands. In both cases

Preserving Intent: What’s Lost in the Cinematic Translation of Mrs. Dalloway

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I like to follow up my reading of a text with its cinematic counterpart. After finishing Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, I rented the DVD of the same name with great anticipation. But after the credits rolled, I was unsatisfied: while the cinematic version of Woolf’s novel provides a touching

Hello from the Other Side: Why We Need and Ought to Translate and Read Translations

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As children, we’re both fascinated with the idea of the great big world around us, and consumed with the notion that we are at its center. I recall sleepless nights, hearing my father return home late from work, and tiptoeing past my sleeping sister’s bed to the living room

Out of the Blue and Onto the Page: How Translation Rekindled My Passion for Writing

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When my mother, born in America to Israeli parents, first met my father in Tel Aviv, she said she knew he was right for her because he was an American living in Israel. As a young woman who grew up in transit—constantly being moved around between the two countries—she