ESTHER ALLEN translated, edited, and annotated the Penguin Classics anthology The Selected Writings of José Martí (2002) and has translated a number of other works from Spanish and French, including, most recently, Antonio Di Benedetto’s Zama (NYRB Classics, 2014). Editor of the 2007 report on translation and globalization To Be Translated or Not to Be, she has twice received fellowships from the NEA (1995, 2010), was named a Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres in 2006, and was a 2009 Fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. She teaches at Baruch College, City University of New York.
DAVID BELLOS is the director of the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication at Princeton University, where he is also a professor of French and comparative literature. He has won many awards for his translations, including the Man Booker International Prize for translation. He received the Prix Goncourt for his biography of Georges Perec and has also written biographies of Jacques Tati and Romain Gary. He is most recently the author of Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything (Faber, 2011).
SUSAN BERNOFSKY is the translator of books by Robert Walser, Jenny Erpenbeck, Yoko Tawada, Hermann Hesse, Gregor von Rezzori, and others, and the author of Foreign Words: Translator-Authors in the Age of Goethe (Kritik Series, Wayne State University Press, 2005). She received the 2006 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize and the 2012 Hermann Hesse Translation Prize as well as awards and fellowships from the NEH, the NEA, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Leon Levy Center for Biography, and the Lannan Foundation. She chairs the PEN Translation Committee and is the director of Literary Translation at Columbia in Columbia University’s School of the Arts, where she teaches in the M.F.A. writing program.
Scholar and translator CLARE CAVANAGH is the author of Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West (2010), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. She is also the author of Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition (1995) and is at work on the authorized biography of Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz. She has translated numerous collections from poets including Milosz, Wislawa Szymborska, and Adam Zagajewski. Cavanagh’s many awards for translation include the John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize in Translation and the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize for Outstanding Literary Translation. Her translation of Wislawa Szymborska’s latest volume, Here (2010), won the Found in Translation Award. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, and the American Council of Learned Societies, she teaches Slavic and comparative literatures at Northwestern University.
PETER COLE is the author of three books of poems, most recently Things on Which I’ve Stumbled (New Directions). His many volumes of translations from Hebrew and Arabic include The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse from the Jewish Tradition (Yale), The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950–1492 (Princeton), Aharon Shabtai’s War and Love, Love and War: New & Selected Poems (New Directions), and Taha Muhammad Ali’s So What: New & Selected Poems 1973–2005 (Copper Canyon). With Adina Hoffman, he has also published a volume of nonfiction, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (Schocken/Nextbook). Cole has received numerous honors for his work, including an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature; fellowships from the NEA, the NEH, and the Guggenheim Foundation; and the PEN Translation Award for Poetry. In 2007 he was named a MacArthur Fellow.
MICHAEL EMMERICH teaches Japanese literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has translated numerous books from Japanese, including Yasunari Kawabata’s First Snow on Fuji; Gen’ichiro Takahashi’s Sayonara, Gangsters; Banana Yoshimoto’s The Lake; and Hiromi Kawakami’s Manazuru, which was awarded the 2010 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. He is the editor of Read Real Japanese Fiction and New Penguin Parallel Texts: Short Stories in Japanese, and the author of The Tale of Genji: Translation, Canonization, and World Literature, forthcoming from Columbia University Press.
MAUREEN FREELY is the author of six novels (Mother’s Helper, The Life of the Party, The Stork Club, Under the Vulcania, The Other Rebecca, and most recently Enlightenment) as well as three works of nonfiction (Pandora’s Clock, What About Us? An Open Letter to the Mothers Feminism Forgot, and The Parent Trap). The translator of five books by the Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk (Snow, The Black Book, Istanbul: Memories of a City, Other Colours, and The Museum of Innocence), she is active in various campaigns to champion free expression. She also works with campaigns to promote world literature in English translation. She has been a regular contributor to the Guardian, the Observer, the Independent, and the Sunday Times for two decades, writing on feminism, family and social policy, Turkish culture and politics, and contemporary writing.
FORREST GANDER has degrees in geology and English literature. His recent books include the novel As a Friend and the book of haibun and poems Core Samples from the World, both from New Directions. Watchword, Gander’s translation of Pura López Colomé’s Villaurrutia Award-winning book of poems, came out in 2012. His other recent translations include Firefly Under the Tongue: Selected Poems of Coral Bracho (PEN Translation Prize Finalist), and (with Kyoko Yoshida) Spectacle & Pigsty: Selected Poems of Kiwao Nomura, awarded the 2012 Best Translated Book Award for poetry. A United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow, Gander is the recipient of fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim, Howard, and Whiting foundations. He is the Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor of Literary Arts and Comparative Literature at Brown University.
THEODORE (TED) GOOSSEN is professor of humanities at York University in Toronto, Canada, and a founding member of the Department of Contemporary Literary Studies at the University of Tokyo. He has written extensively on Japanese literature and film, and has published translations by numerous authors including Hiromi Kawakami, Yoko Ogawa, Masuji Ibuse, Naoya Shiga, Yukio Mishima, and Haruki Murakami. He is editor of The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories and is presently coeditor, with Motoyuki Shibata, of Monkey Business International, the first Japanese literary magazine to be made available in an English version. His translations of Haruki Murakami’s first two major works, Kaze no Uta o Kike (Hear the Wind Sing, 1979) and 1973-Nen no Piboru (Pinball, 1973, 1980), will be published by Alfred A. Knopf.
JASON GRUNEBAUM is a senior lecturer in Hindi at the University of Chicago. He is the translator of Uday Prakash’s novel The Girl with the Golden Parasol (Penguin India, 2008; Yale University Press, 2013) and Manzoor Ahtesham’s The Tale of the Missing Man (with Ulrike Stark). His translation of Prakash’s story “The Walls of Delhi” was included in Delhi Noir (Akashic Books, 2009) and will be published along with two other novellas by Prakash in a collection entitled The Walls of Delhi in early 2012 by University of Western Australia Press. Grunebaum has been awarded a PEN Translation Fund grant, an NEA Literature fellowship, and an ALTA fellowship for his translation work, as well as residencies at the Blue Mountain Center for the Arts and the Djerassi Foundation. He has a B.A. from Brown University and a M.F.A. in fiction from Columbia University. His fiction has been published in the magazines One Story, Web Conjunctions, Southwest Review, and Third Coast. Salman Rushdie selected his “Maria Ximenes da Costa de Carvalho Perreira” as a distinguished short story of 2007.
ALICE KAPLAN is the John M. Musser Professor of French at Yale University. Before her arrival at Yale, she was the Gilbert, Louis and Edward Lehrman Professor of Romance Studies and Professor of Literature and History and founding director of the Center for French and Francophone Studies at Duke University. She is the author of Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life (1986); French Lessons: A Memoir (1993); The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach (2000); and, most recently, The Interpreter (2005), about racial injustice in the American army witnessed by Louis Guilloux. Kaplan is also the translator into English of Lous Guilloux’s novel OK, Joe; Evelyne Bloch-Dano’s Madame Proust: A Biography; and three books by Roger Grenier: Piano Music for Four Hands, Another November, and The Difficulty of Being a Dog.
CHRISTI ANN MERRILL is an associate professor of South Asian literature and postcolonial theory at the University of Michigan, and author of Riddles of Belonging: India in Translation and Other Tales of Possession. Her translation of the stories of Rajasthani writer Vijay Dan Detha, Chouboli and Other Stories, has recently been published by Katha (New Delhi) and Fordham University Press (New York).
HARUKI MURAKAMI is an internationally acclaimed writer whose awards include the Franz Kafka Prize (2006), the Jerusalem Prize (2009), and the International Catalunya Prize (2011). Among his novels are Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985; English, 1991), Norwegian Wood (1987; English, 2000), The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1995, English, 1997), Kafka on the Shore (2002; English, 2005), and 1Q84 (2009; English, 2011). His work has been translated into forty-two languages. He is also a prolific and best-selling translator of American fiction into Japanese. Authors and works he has translated include C. D. B. Bryan, Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany’s), Raymond Carver (Complete Works), Raymond Chandler (The Long Goodbye), Bill Crow, Terry Farish, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jim Fusilli, Mark Helprin, John Irving, Ursula K. Le Guin, Tim O’Brien, Grace Paley (Enormous Changes at the Last Minute), J. D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye), Mark Strand, Paul Theroux, and Chris Van Allsburg.
CATHERINE PORTER, 2009 President of the Modern Language Association, is visiting professor, Society for the Humanities, Cornell University, and professor of French emerita, State University of New York, Cortland, where she served as chair of the Department of International Communications and Culture, 1985–1991 and 1997–2001. She has translated some three dozen books in the humanities and the social sciences, most recently Patrick Weil, How to Be French (2008); Maurice Sartre, Histoires Grecques: Snapshots from Antiquity (2009); Avital Ronell, Fighting Theory (2010); and Jean-Christophe Bailly (The Animal Side, 2011). Recent articles include “Presidential Address 2009: English Is Not Enough” (PMLA 125, no. 3). She received her doctorate in French literature from Yale University in 1972.
JOSÉ MANUEL PRIETO is the author of several works of fiction and nonfiction, including the internationally acclaimed trilogy of novels Enciclopedia de una vida en Rusia (Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia), Livadia (published in English as Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire), and Rex. His novel Voz humana (Human Voice) is forth-coming. He has translated into Spanish works by Anna Akhmatova, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Andrei Platonov, Gennady Aygi, and many others. Prieto earned his Ph.D. in history at the Universidad Autónoma de México. He has been a fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers and received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has taught at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económica (CIDE) in Mexico City, Cornell University as a visiting professor, and Princeton University as a distinguished lecturer. He currently teaches at Seton Hall University.
In addition to his various editions of Pound for the Library of America and New Directions, RICHARD SIEBURTH has published translations of works by Hölderlin (Hymns and Fragments), Büchner (Lenz), Benjamin (Moscow Diary), Scholem (The Fullness of Time: Poems), Nostradamus (The Prophecies), Scève (Emblems of Desire), Nerval (Selected Writings [PEN Book-of-the-Month Prize]; The Salt Smugglers), Michaux (Emergences-Resurgences; Stroke by Stroke), Leiris (Nights as Day, Days as Night), and Guillevic (Geometries). He is currently working on a translation/edition of late Baudelaire, for which he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Chevalier de l’ordre des palmes académiques. He teaches French and comparative literature at New York University.
Professor of English at Temple University, LAWRENCE VENUTI is a translation theorist and historian as well as a translator from Italian, French, and Catalan. He is the author of The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (2nd ed., 2008), The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference (1998), and Translation Changes Everything: Theory and Practice (2012), as well as the editor of The Translation Studies Reader (3rd ed., 2012). His translations include the anthology Italy: A Traveler’s Literary Companion (2003), Massimo Carlotto’s crime novel The Goodbye Kiss (2006), and Ernest Farrés’s Edward Hopper: Poems (2009), for which he won the Robert Fagles Translation Prize.
ELIOT WEINBERGER’s books of literary essays include Karmic Traces, An Elemental Thing, and Oranges & Peanuts for Sale. His political articles are collected in What I Heard About Iraq and What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles. The author of a study of Chinese poetry translation, 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, he translates the poetry of Bei Dao and is editor of The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry and a forthcoming series of classics from Chinese University Press of Hong Kong. Among his translations and editions of Latin American poetry and prose are The Poems of Octavio Paz, Jorge Luis Borges’s Selected Non-Fictions (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism), Xavier Villaurrutia’s Nostalgia for Death, and Vicente Huidobro’s Altazor. His work has been translated into thirty languages.