Message from the MFA Director

We are thrilled to welcome the fifth cohort of students to the Literary Translation Master’s of Fine Arts program. Our students last year have produced really impressive capstone translation projects and we are looking forward to a vibrant intelectual exchange and more great translations this year.

Our Program currently offers tracks in twelve languages (Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Ancient Greek, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Persian, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish), and is officially housed in the Department of World Languages & Literatures, with active involvement of faculty from BU’s distinguished departments of Romance Studies, Classical Studies, Creative Writing, and English. Among them are many prolific translators, specialists in a range of classical and modern literary traditions.

Translation has been studied and practiced at BU for a long time. The Literary Translation MFA proudly draws upon the forty-year tradition of the Translation Seminar begun by Rodolfo Cardona and Rosanna Warren, which since the late 1970s has hosted hundreds of eminent translators and scholars of translation. Recordings of many of these historic lectures are available in the Program’s substantial audio and video archive. BU’s enviable reputation in Translation Studies means we are a globally recognized center of academic excellence in the field: in Fall 2018, the University hosted Translation Now, a conference that drew together translators and scholars from all over the world to discuss the issues that inform approaches to translation today and that will shape translation in the future. Interested visitors will find the recordings of the conference presentations here.

I invite you to explore the site and to consider joining our community in this intellectually vibrant and deeply literary city.

                                                                    Anna Zielinska-Elliott, Director
Literary Translation MFA
aelliott@bu.edu