The Columbia Rare Book and Manuscript Library is excited to be working with a number of centers on campus to invite some of the most distinguished literary translators to campus on March 7, 2014. This event is free and open to the public.

A Panel on Retranslating Literary Classics

with
Edith Grossman on CERVANTES
Wyatt Mason on MONTAIGNE and
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky on DOSTOYEVSKY
moderated by Susan Bernofsky

Friday, March 7, 2014, 11am-1pm
Miller Theatre, 2960 Broadway at 116th Street
Columbia University Morningside Campus

This panel brings together four esteemed translators to discuss the process of retranslating an work of literature that has already been translated into multiple languages, often multiple times. Some opine that every generation needs a new translation of Homer, and this panel will discuss the literary and linguistic dynamics underlying that understanding as well as the endeavor of working with or against pre-existing translations.

Edith Grossman is one of the most well respected translators from Spanish to English. She spent most of her career translating Latin American authors such as Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and has more recently has undertaken works from Spain's Golden Age such as Gongora's Soledades and Cervantes's Don Quixote. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have translated many works together, beginning with Dostoevesky's The Brothers Karamazov. They have since re-translated the major works of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, as well as works by Gogol, Leskov, Chekhov, and Bulgakov. Wyatt Mason is a writer, translator, and award-winning critic. His translations of many of Montaigne's Essays appeared in The Threepenny Review and his translations of Rimbaud have been coming out with the Modern Library. Susan Bernofsky is a writer, translator from German, and Director of Literary Translation at Columbia (LTAC). Her new translation of Kafka's Metamorphosis came out with Norton in January 2014. She is working on a biography of the Swiss writer Robert Walser, many of whose works she has translated.

Co-sponsored by the Friends of the Columbia University Libraries, the Center for the Core Curriculum, the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Harriman Institute, the Maison Francaise, and the Hispanic Institute.