Paraphrasis Podcast

What does a translator do when one Russian word summons an entire visual world while English barely has a name for it? Nadezhda, Sasha, and Philippa unpack the long Google Doc trail behind a tear-off calendar, a photo mural, and the quiet surrealism of office décor that says everything without saying much.

To close out Season 2, we spoke with three translators—Sasha Karsavina, Philippa Mullins, and Nadezhda Vikulina—about their collaborative translation of Girls and Institutions (excerpt in n+1, 2024), Russian writer and activist Daria Serenko’s polyphonic portrait of girls under late-state bureaucracy. From tangled pronouns to shifting registers, the trio walks us through their methods of translating a text where everyday office work gives way to flashes of levity and transcendence. Somewhere between the poetic and the prosaic, every sentence becomes a site of collective negotiation and female solidarity.

What do we do with a word that means both “if” and “yes”? Annabel shares the experience of grappling with the ending poem of Plasmas, where conditional grammar runs up against an imaginative imperative. Annabel ultimately lands on a solution that preserves the tremble between if and yes.

Annabel Kim joins us to talk about Plasmas (Deep Vellum, 2022), Céline Minard’s posthuman sci-fi series of vignettes that read like a syntactical tornado. As Annabel unpacks Minard’s invented jargons and depictions of estranged humanity, we follow a translation journey shaped by ecological grief, disorienting prose, and the polysemous charge of language that refuses clarity.

What happens when you translate from a poetic tradition that sidesteps rhyme into one that can’t help but hum in iambic pentameter? Spencer weighs the trade-offs of bringing Korean free verse into rhyme-chasing English, and why the occasional slant rhyme might be a translator’s best currency.

Spencer Lee-Lenfield brings us Biologicity (Black Ocean, 2024) by South Korean poet Shin Hae-uk, a collection with offbeat turns, twisted logic, and sudden switches in vocabulary. Spencer walks us through how to navigate deliberate fragmentation in the Korean word order, and the strange intimacy of rendering a poet who can comment on your translation in real time. We close with a glimpse into Spencer’s in-progress translation of Shin’s newest collection.

What happens when a title becomes too familiar? Mark Harman defends his decision to ditch “The Metamorphosis” for “The Transformation”—a shift that scraps the Latinate gloss, restores fidelity to Kafka’s voice, and moves against cultural habit.

Mark Harman returns to Kafka with Selected Stories (Harvard University Press, 2024), a collection that combines courtroom logic with surrealist punchlines. We discuss Kafka’s subtle irony, the mysteries tucked behind the lines, and the challenge of translating a voice that leaves the reader deliberately responsible for the text. As Mark delves into the subtle nuance and humor of Kafka’s Austrian-flavored German, he shows why Kafka is a one of those writers who we will never be finished translating.

During the 2024-25 academic year, the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard celebrated its departmental anniversary—and Paraphrasis is launching a series of summer special episodes to commemorate the occasion. In our last edition of the series, guest host Esther K. Heller sits down with two Harvard University in Comparative Literature alumni, Prof. Andrea Bachner who graduated in 2007 and Dr. Michael O’Krent who graduated this spring (2025). Together, they reflect on their experiences in the Comparative Literature department at Harvard, examine how the field has evolved, and explore what lies ahead for the next generation of comparatists.

What’s in a name? How do you translate a poet’s name that appears in multiple forms: sometimes in Hebrew as “the good name,” sometimes in various Spanish renderings, used by the poet himself for the sake of his rhyme scheme? In this bonus episode, Adam reflects on the quiet act of restituting “Shem Tov.” This isn’t a word puzzle, he tells us. It is a decision grounded in emotion.