Susan Bernofsky directs the literary translation program at the Columbia University School of the Arts and writes the blog Translationista. A 2014 Guggenheim fellow, she is co-editor, with Esther Allen, of the anthology In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means. Her translation of The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck is forthcoming on November 1.
Susan Bernofsky
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Writing on Public Books
Translating the Architecture of Desire: An Interview with Wallace Shawn
Well over a dozen years in the making, Wallace Shawn’s theatrical collaboration with André Gregory on Henrik Ibsen’s 1892 play A Master Builder opened this summer in New York theaters—movie theaters, that is, as a film directed by Jonathan Demme. Much like Vanya on 42nd Street, Louis Malle’s 1994 film based on an earlier Gregory/Shawn […]
Translating The Magic Flute
When I got a call last year about translating a new Magic Flute libretto for an English-language production at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis, I couldn’t have been more thrilled. The Magic Flute had always been one of my all-time favorite operas, though I’d never paid particular attention to the libretto. Mozart composed the […]
The Joys of Multiplicity
Translation contains multitudes. Since there is no one right way to translate most things worth translating—though there are many wrong ways—translation opens up a sphere of multiplicity in which you can elect to enjoy your Bovary à la Lydia Davis or in the style of Steegmuller. Whose Crime and Punishment was Edward Snowden reading in […]
