The BU Translation Seminar offers a lecture series open to the public each spring semester.
Boston University has a long tradition of teaching, studying, and practicing literary translation. Our first translation lecture series was offered in 1978, before Translation Studies was even a recognized field. Invited speakers from around the world, including many of the most accomplished translators and literary figures of the last half-century, have spoken here. The Seminar has in turn fostered the literary careers of generations of BU students, teaching them the art of translation and bringing them into fruitful contact with established translators, editors, publishers, and writers worldwide. The lectures are also open to the public and attract audiences from all over Boston and New England.
Here is the exciting lineup for our Spring ’25 series. All talks are in person only, free and open to the public, with light refreshments to follow. This year’s series will be moderated by Prof. Margaret Litvin.
January 24, 2025. Roberta Micallef - Why Do We Need Artichoke: Ottoman and Turkish Literary Translations in the 21st Century
CAS 306, 725 Commonwealth Avenue
2:30 – 4:15
Roberta Micallef is Professor of the Practice in World Languages and Literatures in the Boston University Department of World Languages and Literatures. She teaches courses on modern Middle Eastern Literature, Modern Middle Eastern Film, Turkic Literatures, and Travel Literature. Micallef is a core faculty member in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. Micallef is an active member of the Turkish language teaching community and has served as the Executive Secretary and the President of the American Association of Teachers of Turkic Languages. Micallef is the recipient of the BU College of Arts & Sciences Susan Jackson award (2020).
January 31, 2025. Angela Rodel - The Past's Discreet Monsters: Strategies for Translating History in Contemporary Bulgarian Novels
CAS 306, 725 Commonwealth Avenue
2:30 – 4:15
Angela Rodel is a literary translator who holds degrees from Yale and UCLA. Nine Bulgarian novels in her translation have been published in the US and UK, and shorter works have appeared in McSweeney’s, Two Lines, Ploughshares, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. She has received NEA and PEN translation grants. Her translation of Georgi Gospodinov’s Physics of Sorrow won the 2016 AATSEEL Prize for Literary Translation, while her translation of his novel Time Shelter was featured on The New Yorker’s list of Best Books of 2022 and won the 2023 International Booker Prize. Since 2015 she has served as executive director of the Bulgarian-American Fulbright Commission.
February 7, 2025. Nick Glastonbury - Love's Labors Lost: Turkish, Kurdish, and the Desires of Translations
CAS 306, 725 Commonwealth Avenue
2:30 – 4:15
Nick Glastonbury is a translator of Turkish and Kurdish literature, and a cultural anthropologist of sound, media, empire, the Middle East, and the former Soviet Union. At present, he is a postdoctoral associate in the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University. He holds a PhD in Anthropology and a Graduate Certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is also a co-editor of the e-zine Jadaliyya.
February 14, 2025. Mónica De la Torre - Strictly Alimentary: Beckett, Paz, and the Mysteries of the UNESCO Mexican Poetry Anthology
CAS 306, 725 Commonwealth Avenue
2:30 – 4:15
Mónica de la Torre’s most recent book of poems and experimental translations is Repetition Nineteen (Nightboat). Other collections include The Happy End/All Welcome (Ugly Duckling Presse)—a riff on a riff on Kafka’s Amerika—and Public Domain (Roof Books). With Alex Balgiu, she coedited the international anthology Women in Concrete Poetry 1959–79 (Primary Information). She has translated Gerardo Deniz, Amanda Berenguer, Omar Cáceres, and numerous other poets from the Spanish. A recipient of a 2022 Creative Capital grant and the 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts C.D. Wright Award for Poetry, she teaches poetry at Brooklyn College. A new collection, Pause the Document, is forthcoming from Nightboat in March 2025.
February 21, 2025. Damion Searls - The Philosophy of Translation: Reading Like a Translator
CAS 306, 725 Commonwealth Avenue
2:30 – 4:15
Damion Searls has translated sixty books from German, French, Norwegian, and Dutch, including modern classics by Proust, Gide, and Nietzsche; Mann, Hesse, Walser, and Wittgenstein; Rilke, Jelinek, and Modiano; Victoria Kielland, Ariane Koch, and Nescio; and a dozen books by 2023 Nobel Prize winner Jon Fosse. A Guggenheim, Cullman Center, and two-time NEA fellow, he edited Thoreau’s The Journal for NYRB Classics and is the author of The Inkblots: a history of the Rorschach test and the first biography of its creator. His latest books are The Philosophy of Translation and The Mariner’s Mirror, a poetry chapbook.
February 28, 2025. Eugene Ostashevsky - Tango with Cows: Russian Futurist Poetics and the Global Tango Revolution
CAS 306, 725 Commonwealth Avenue
2:30 – 4:15
Eugene Ostashevsky is a poet and experimental translator. He is the author of, most recently, The Feeling Sonnets (Carcanet, NYRB Poets), a book of poems that examine the effects of speaking a non-native language on emotions, parenting, and identity. As a translator, Ostashevsky is best known for his editions of the Russian avant-garde, such as OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism (Northwestern UP, 2006). His recent translations include Lucky Breaks by the Ukrainian fiction writer Yevgenia Belorusets (New Directions, 2022). His recent research is on the intersection of Futurism and popular culture in 1913. He is developing a theory of translingual poetry based on bilingual language use.
March 21, 2025. Bruna Dantas Lobato - Rules Are For Breaking: Translating Outside of the Mother Tongue, Self-Translation, and Other Translation Heresies
CAS 306, 725 Commonwealth Avenue
2:30 – 4:15
Bruna Dantas Lobato is a writer and translator. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Guernica, A Public Space, and The Common. She was awarded the 2023 National Book Award in Translated Literature for The Words that Remain by Stênio Gardel. Originally from Natal, Brazil, she lives in Iowa and teaches at Grinnell College. Her debut novel, Blue Light Hours, is out now from Grove Atlantic.
March 28, 2025. Anna Ziajka Stanton - Translating Arabic Theory: Portable Concepts for a New Lexicon
CAS 306, 725 Commonwealth Avenue
2:30 – 4:15
Anna Ziajka Stanton is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at The Pennsylvania State University. Her first book, The Worlding of Arabic Literature: Language, Affect, and the Ethics of Translatability, was published by Fordham University Press in 2023. Other recent projects include editing a special feature on Arabic literary theory for the journal PMLA and contributing a chapter on “Translation” in the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Modern Arabic Literature. Her translation from Arabic of Hilal Chouman’s novel Limbo Beirut was longlisted for the 2017 PEN Translation Prize and shortlisted for the 2017 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation.
April 4, 2025. Laura Marris - Ecologies of Memory: Translating Place and Psychogeography in Francophone Literature
CAS 306, 725 Commonwealth Avenue
2:30 – 4:15
Laura Marris is an essayist, poet, and translator. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Believer, Harper’s, The New York Times, The Paris Review Daily, The Yale Review, Words Without Borders and elsewhere. Her recent translations include Albert Camus’s The Plague, Paol Keineg’s Triste Tristan (co-translated with Rosmarie Waldrop), and To Live Is to Resist, a biography of Antonio Gramsci. Books she has translated have been shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the Scott Moncrieff Prize, and the French-American Foundation Translation Prize. Her first solo-authored book, The Age of Loneliness, was published by Graywolf in August 2024.
April 11, 2025. Anton Hur - Translating Korean Literature
CAS 306, 725 Commonwealth Avenue
2:30 – 4:15
Anton Hur is the author of Toward Eternity and the translator of Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny, Baek Sehee’s I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki, Lee Seong-bok’s Indeterminate Inflorescence, Kyung-Sook Shin’s Violets, and others. He was double-longlisted and shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, a finalist for the National Book Award, and nominated for the Dublin Literary Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He resides in Seoul.
April 18, 2025. Polly Barton - Translating Vertiginously: Coaxing Mild Vertigo from Japanese into English
CAS 306, 725 Commonwealth Avenue
2:30 – 4:15
Polly Barton is a Japanese translator and writer, based in the UK. Translations include Spring Garden by Tomoka Shibasaki, There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura, Mild Vertigo by Mieko Kanai and Butter by Asako Yuzuki. Her translation of Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda won a World Fantasy Award in 2021. She is the author of Fifty Sounds and Porn: An Oral History, both published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.
Asta Fanney Sirurðardottir, an Icelandic poet, and her translator Vala Thorodds speaking at the Translation Seminar in 2023.
