In this new episode, join host Rainer Schulte as he sits down with Heather Cleary, an esteemed translator who has played a pivotal role in bringing Latin American literature to English-speaking audiences, translating works by celebrated authors, and helping to bridge cultural divides. Her expertise in translation offers insights into the challenges and rewards of making Latin American narratives accessible to a broader audience.

You will hear about Cleary's journey as both translator and educator, as well as her insights on the importance of translation in curriculums.

Cleary's most recent translations include, Reservoir Bitches (Perras de Reserva) by Dahlia de la Cerda and Recital of the Dark Verses (Declaración de las canciones oscuras) by Luis Felipe Fabre.

In this new episode, join host Rainer Schulte as he virtually sits down with Luise von Flotow, Translator and Professor of Translation and Interpretation at the Univeristy of Ottawa in Canada. You will hear about Luise’s journey teaching about the setbacks she’s faced as translator and the challenges translation studies face in academia, culturally, and politically.

Luise von Flotow, has taught Translation Studies at the University of Ottawa in Canada since 1996. Her main research interests lie in feminist and gender issues in translation, translation as cultural diplomacy, and audiovisual translation.

Her most recent academic book publications include, Translating Women, Different Voices and New Horizons (2017), edited by Luise von Flotow and Farzaneh Frahazad and The Routledge Handbook on Translation, Feminism and Gender (2020), edited by Luise von Flotow and Hala Kamal. She is also a literary translator, working from German and French to English and her most recent translations include, Running by Isabel Bogdan Laufen, translated from the German; All the World’s A Mall (“Un monde en toc”) by Rinny Gremaud, translated from the French; and The World at My Back (“Die Welt im Rücken”) by Thomas Melle, translated from the German.

In this new episode, join host Rainer Schulte as he virtually sits down with Peter Filkins, Translator and Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at Bard College at Simon's Rock. You will hear about Peter's journey teaching his translation course at Bard's College and his experience translating Ingeborg Bachmann. 

Peter Filkins has translated Ingeborg Bachmann’s collected poems, Darkness Spoken, the second expanded edition of which appears in April 2024. His translation of two novel fragments by Bachmann, “The Book of Franza” and “Requiem for Fanny Goldmann,” appeared in 1999 from Northwestern UP. He has also translated three novels by H.G. Adler for Random House – Panorama, The Journey, and The Wall. His biography of Adler, H.G. Adler: A Life in Many Worlds, was published by Oxford UP in 2019, and his translation of Elias Canetti’s The Book Against Death appears this May from Fitzcarraldo Editions and New Directions.

He teaches writing and literature at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, and translation at Bard College. He is currently at work on a biography of Ingeborg Bachmann.

In this new episode, join host Rainer Schulte and guest co-host Shelby Vincent as they virtually sit down with Edward Burke, a literary magazine flash fiction writer who goes by the anonym "strannikov". You will hear about Edward's journey as a writer, his experiences with poetry, and his perspective on making poetry more accessible to younger generations.

Edward has published essays since 2011 appearing online in literary journals and magazines, such as Fictionaut, Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, The Miscreant, The Earth Journal, and more. His verse (since 2016) has appeared online in literary journals and magazines, such as Oddball Magazine, and The Courtship of Winds, and in print at Chiron Review.

In this new episode, join host Rainer Schulte and guest co-host Shelby Vincent as they virtually sit down with Sean Cotter, Translator and Professor of Literature and Translation Studies at The University of Texas at Dallas in the Harry W. Bass Jr. School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology. You will hear about Sean's journey as a translator of the Romanian, his experience translating Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu, and his perspective on the Romanian literary translation scene.

Sean, an award-winning translator of the Romanian, has published 11 books in English translation. His most recent is Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu for which he received National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship and for which Cărtărescu won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. Some of his other works in translation include T.O. Bobe’s Curl and Nichita Stănescu’s Wheel with a Single Spoke and Other Poems, which won the Best Translated Book Award for Poetry in 2013 by Three Percent.

In this new episode, join host Rainer Schulte and guest host Shelby Vincent as they virtually sit down with renowned author Carmen Boullosa. You will hear about Carmen's journey as a Mexican writer, and gain insights into her visionary perspective on the future of writers and readers.

Carmen Boullosa is the author of a dozen volumes of poetry and has published nineteen novels (Shelby Vincent translated Heavens on Earth; her most recent novel - The Book of Eve - was translated by Samantha Schnee), as well as four books of essays and ten plays (seven staged). She is a Distinguished Lecturer at Macaulay Honors College, CUNY. She was a Guggenheim Fellow, as well as a Cullman Center and DAAD fellow. Winner of the prizes Casa de América in Madrid (poetry), Ibargüengoitia, Villarrutia and José Emilio Pacheco in Mexico, among others.

In this new episode, host Rainer Schulte sits down with Mark Polizzotti for a virtual conversation about poet Arthur Rimbaud. Most recently Mark Polizzotti published The Drunken Boat by Arthur Rimbaud. In this volume, renowned translator Mark Polizzotti offers authoritative and inspired new versions of Rimbaud’s major poems and letters. 

Polizzotti has translated more than 50 books from French and he is the recipient of numerous prizes and the author of eleven books, including Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton, Highway 61 Revisited, and Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, ARTnews, The Nation, Parnassus, Bookforum, and elsewhere.

In this new episode, host Rainer Schulte sat down with Harvard Professor Louis Menand for a virtual conversation on the future of the humanities. In December 2021, Menand published an essay in The New Yorker titled “What’s so Great about Great-Books Courses,” which is certain to be of interest to those who study and teach the Humanities.

Menand was previously an associate editor of The New Republic, editor of The New Yorker, and contributing editor of the New York Review of Books. He is currently a staff writer at The New Yorker. In 2016 he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama. His most notable book, The Metaphysical Club won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in History, the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians, and the Heartland Prize from the Chicago Tribune. Dr. Menand’s most recently published book, The Free World, offers a new intellectual and cultural history of the postwar years and is one of The New York Times’s 100 best books of 2021.

In the season finale, Sarah Valente sat down with Pulitzer Prize winning author Benjamin Moser, for a virtual conversation about their shared love of Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. Ben is responsible for making Clarice widely available in translation in the English-speaking world. Because of his work, Sarah was able to organize a single author course on Clarice Lispector last spring, where American university students, for the first time in their lives, heard the name and studied the works of this beloved giant of Brazilian literature. Benjamin Moser is the author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book of 2009. For his work bringing Clarice Lispector to international prominence, he received Brazil’s first State Prize for Cultural Diplomacy. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017, and his latest book, Sontag: Her Life and Work, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2020.

This conversation was recorded on August 25, 2021.

When reading a text in translation are you reading the author’s writing or the translator’s writing? 

Listen to this thought-provoking conversation in which author Claudia Hamm and translator Johnny Becker discuss Claudia's essay entitled, “Who does a translated text belong to?” published in Germany's leading intellectual review Merkur in April 2018. In this rich discussion our guests and hosts address issues of equivalency and voice in translation. This episode invites you to explore how to approach translated texts from a new perspective.

This conversation was recorded on September 10, 2021.