Weird, Funny, Delicious Books Wanted: A Conversation with Emma Ramadan, by Veronica Esposito

Interviews Veronica Esposito Emma Ramadan is a literary translator based in Providence, Rhode Island, where she is the co-owner of Riffraff, a bookstore and bar. She is the recipient of an NEA Translation Fellowship, a PEN/Heim grant, and a Fulbright scholarship (see WLT, Nov. 2015, 32). She has translated over a dozen books, including Sphinx, by Anne Garréta, which was the first English translation of a book by a female member of the Oulipo, and Pretty Things, by Virginie Despentes. Veronica Esposito: What has changed in the translation world since you emerged as a translator several years ago, and where do you think these developments are headed going forward? Emma Ramadan: I see a lot more translators writing about their translation process in very personal ways and in large-scale venues, which I think is fantastic, and hopefully symbolic of the craft of translation being taken more seriously and also celebrated more widely. Two recent pieces I loved were Lara Vergnaud writing about translating Ahmed Bouanani’s The Hospital for The Paris Review and Laura Marris writing about retranslating Camus’s The Plague during our current pandemic for the New York Times. I’ve also been obsessed with Yasmine Seale’s erasure art around her retranslation of The Thousand and One Nights, which she wrote about for the Poetry Society. These last two also speak to a larger trend of women retranslating classics that have been translated repeatedly... Continue reading at 'World Literature Today'

[ World Literature Today | 2020-05-18 18:20:27 UTC ]

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