A masterful new Kafka book will bring you closer to the writer than ever before
Mark Harman's new translation of Kafka's stories may just be the best book published this year
Translations
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Opinion An elite literary journal imploded over an essay about the war — because it dared to humanize Israelis as well as Palestinians
Guernica staff resigned en masse after a co-publisher declared a piece by a Hebrew and Arabic translator 'an apologia for Zionism'
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Culture How Isaac Bashevis Singer’s translator edits without editing
David Stromberg, the Yiddishist behind a new collection of the Nobel Prize winner's essays for the Forward, talks about the challenges of bringing his work to a modern audience
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Culture ‘What she’s doing is anti-translation.’ Why Israeli translators are upset about Rooney’s boycott.
Sally Rooney’s decision to refuse the translation rights of her latest novel to “Israeli-based” publishers has implications not just for BDS, but for the greater dialogue across languages. While Rooney clarified her position to state that she is not boycotting Hebrew, the prospect of a widely-available Hebrew translation not published in Israel seems unlikely. In…
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Fast Forward Sally Rooney clarifies: She’s boycotting Israel, not the Hebrew language.
On Tuesday, celebrated Irish novelist Sally Rooney clarified her stance on Hebrew translations of her new novel “Beautiful World, Where Are You.” “The Hebrew-language translation rights to my new novel are still available,” Rooney wrote in a statement the Forward received from her agent, Tracy Bohan, on Tuesday following reports that she had declined to…
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Culture The monumental effort of translating ‘Harry Potter’ into Yiddish
Read in Yiddish. When Arun Viswanath, the Yiddish translator of J. K. Rowling’s worldwide bestseller “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” was 12 years old, he suddenly had a revelation that made him feel dejected. Although he’s a grandson of the venerable Yiddish linguist Mordkhe Schaechter, the son of the Yiddish poet Gitl Schaechter-Viswanath, and…
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Culture The Refugee War Reporter Who Brought ‘Doctor Zhivago’ To The West
Over the past decade, the remarkable story of the international late 1950s effort to defy Soviet censors and secure publication of “Doctor Zhivago” has focused on the role played by western spies and spooks. But while the CIA secretly worked to smuggle bootleg copies of Boris Pasternak’s masterpiece back into the Soviet Union — a…
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Culture Remembering Sasson Somekh, Who Insisted On Arab Literature’s Place In Israel
Editor’s note: This piece was originally published on September 22, 2012. It was republished on August 19, 2019 after Sasson Somekh’s death at age 86. Translations have the potential to communicate one culture to another, strengthening humanistic ties. Translators can be peacemakers, self-abnegatingly finding compromises in the perilous confrontation of languages. No one exemplified this…
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