Margaret Litvin

Margaret Litvin is associate professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature. Her work as a teacher, translator, and writer aims to help people understand how stories, ideas, and human beings grow and change when they move across languages and cultures. Her first book, Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost (Princeton UP, 2011), traced translations and adaptations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in 20^th-century Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, discovering that to understand the Arab Hamlet tradition meant engaging with source texts as diverse as French plays, British essays, and Russian films. Her current work explores two other areas of transregional cultural flows: Arab-Russian literary ties in the long 20^th century, and contemporary Arab/ic theatre for global audiences.

Experiences of translating and being translated have shaped Litvin’s life and career. Born in Moscow, USSR, she immigrated to the United States with her family in 1979 and has studied French, Italian, Spanish, Haitian Creole, Arabic, Swedish, and German. Her project on Arab-Russian ties (working title: Another East: Arab Writers, Moscow Dreams) led her to translate Ice, Egyptian writer Sonallah Ibrahim’s 2011 novel set in Moscow (Seagull Publishing, 2019) and an essay by Syrian filmmaker Mohamad Malas. Hamlet’s Arab Journey appeared in Soha Sebaie’s Arabic translation from Egypt’s National Center for Translation in 2017; meanwhile, Litvin co-edited (with Marvin Carlson) and co-translated a companion anthology, Four Arab Hamlet Plays (2016), one play from which has received a full production at Cornell University; another US theatre company has dramatized her findings on the Arab Hamlet tradition. She is also co-editor of the essay collection Shakespeare & the Arab World (Berghahn, 2019). Her research on Arab/ic theatre for mixed and non-Arabic-speaking audiences (working title: Sindbad’s Raft, Houdini’s Cage: Arabic Theatre in the New World Market) inspired her to translate part of Malmö-based Iraqi playwright Karim Rashed’s play I Came to See You from Arabic and Swedish.

Litvin has twice taught the BU Literary Translation Seminar, an experience whose splendors (not miseries) she described in a 2014 essay for Words without Borders. Her other BU courses, including “Global Shakespeares” and “1001 Nights in the World Literary Imagination,” foreground translation and adaptation issues and feature activities such as a mock-Translators’ Debate where students role-play Husain Haddawy, Sir Richard Burton, Edward Lane, and Antoine Galland. She welcomes students translating drama, fiction, and literary non-fiction.