While still an undergraduate, Michael Emmerich translated Nobel Prize-winning author Yasunari Kawabata’s First Snow on Fuji, which was published by Counterpoint Press in 1999. He has gone on to translate dozens of novels and articles, including works by Banana Yoshimoto. He’s currently both a postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows at Princeton University and an assistant professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Edward Gauvin translates children’s graphic novels for First Second Books and an ongoing comics series for Archaia Studios Press. In 2007 he was awarded a fellowship to attend the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) conference, and this past summer he was in residency at the Banff International Literary Translation Centre, where he was able to pursue further work on fabulist Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud.

A past president of the American Literary Translators Association, Marian Schwartz is one of the top Russian translators of our time. She is the principal English translator of the works of Nina Berberova and recently retranslated Mikhail Bulgakov’s The White Guard and Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov. Over her career she has received a number of prizes, including two translation fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Martha Tennent has lived most of her life in Barcelona, where she was the founding dean of the School of Translation and Interpreting at the University of Vic. She has regularly translated between Spanish, Catalan, and English, including various screenplays for television films and series, as well as a feature film. She also edited Training for the New Millennium: Pedagogies for Translation and Interpreting, and she’s currently translating Mercè Rodoreda’s Death in Spring for Open Letter.

At this roundtable, four translators—who work in a variety of languages and genres—will discuss their experiences as literary translators. The conversation will explore a number of different topics, from how they got started as translators, to the obstacles of retranslating classic works, to translating film scripts during the recent writers’ strike, and should be lively and informative. (Reception to follow.)

Plutzik Library
Rush Rhees Library
University of Rochester
Rochester, NY