Women Translating Women

Where: Mercantile Library Center for Fiction, 17 E 47th St., New York, NY

The Center for Literary Translation at Columbia University will host an event at the Merc on the art of translation. Participants will include Esther Allen on translating New Yorker writer Alma Guillermoprieto and Mexican novelist Rosario Castellanos; Susan Bernofsky on translating German novelist Jenny Erpenbeck; and Becka McKay and Suzane Adam will discuss McKay’s translations of Adam.

Esther Allen has translated a number of books, including José Martí: Selected Writings, and Dancing with Cuba, by Alma Guillermoprieto. Her co-translation of The Selected Non-Fiction of Jorge Luis Borges won the 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. She is the executive director of the Center for Literary Translation, and is an assistant professor at Baruch College, CUNY.

Susan Bernofsky is the translator of four books by Robert Walser as well as novels by Jenny Erpenbeck, Yoko Tawada, Hermann Hesse, Gregor von Rezzori and others. The recipient of the 2006 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize and awards from the PEN Translation Fund, the NEA, the NEH, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Lannan Foundation, she is currently working on a biography of Walser and writing a novel.

Suzane Adam was born in Satu Mare, Transylvania, and came to Israel at age ten. She published her first novel, Laundry, in 2000, followed by Mayamiya in 2002 and Janis’s Mother in 2004. In 2006, she was awarded the Kugel Prize for Janis’s Mother.

Becka Mara McKay is currently working on her PhD in comparative literature. Her poetry and translations have appeared in American Letters and Commentary, Columbia, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere. In 2004 she received a fellowship from the American Literary Translators Association. In 2006 she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.