Paraphrasis Podcast

What’s it like to tame an unruly stanza? And what happens when you’re tasked with translating an erratically rhymed Soviet-era poem, complete with dirt-caked children and a state-dispatched bath squad? In this bonus episode, Miriam Udel shares her translation of Boots in the Bath Squad by Leib Kvitko, a wacky tale of hygiene propaganda and childhood grime. She reflects on the joy of chasing rogue rhymes and the “almost-audible click” when a tricky stanza finally snaps into place.

In this episode, Anna speaks with Miriam Udel about Honey on the Page (NYU Press), her 2021 anthology of Yiddish children’s literature from the 20th century. A project born of her roles as Yiddish scholar, teacher, and mother, the collection brings together folktales, fool stories, and bedtime parables for readers both steeped in Jewish culture and entirely new to it. Miriam walks us through the sticky-sweet meaning behind the book’s title—a nod to a ritual invitation to Jewish literacy. We also hear about her process of commissioning visual illustrations with the late artist Paula Cohen to recast vintag...

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 first edition of the series, guest host Lara Norgaard sits down with Spencer Lee-Lenfield and Sandra Naddaff, two members of the Comp Lit faculty who are also alumni of Harvard College. Together, they discuss the past, present, and future of Translation Studies at Harvard. Along the way, Spencer and Sandra speak to their own journeys into the discipline and how translation developed from something seen as a te...

What is a title? For Anton Hur, it’s “the most liberated thing” in a translator’s toolkit. Listen in on how Your Utopia got its name, as a blunt-sounding gerund in the English was traded in for something with sharper edges. Anton explains why the Korean title To Meet Her (Geunyeoreul Mannada), though thematically crucial, didn’t sit right on the tongue, and how his suggestion, “Your Utopia,” skewers the tech-bro fantasy of sleek, bloodless progress.

In this episode, translator and debut novelist Anton Hur discusses his English translation of Your Utopia (Algonquin Books, 2024), a fantastical and moving collection by South Korean author Bora Chung. From reordering stories to recharging sad robots, Anton shares his journey with Chung’s genre-bending work—and how a casual pitch at a book fair eventually led to Chung’s name on literary longlists. We discuss topics ranging from zombies in space and sentient elevators to the question of whether balancing the beautiful and the faithful in translation is a trade-off or a tandem act. We also hear how Anton naviga...

Why do German nouns seem to bristle with energy while English ones feel flat? And how did he land on Overstaying—a title that’s as pushy and off-kilter as the novel itself? Damion takes us behind the decision to swap a dense German noun for a lopsided English gerund.

Damion Searls reflects on his translation of Overstaying, Swiss author Ariane Koch’s surreal debut novel (Dorothy Project, 2024). He talks through the book’s oddball humor and syntactic sleights—from “brushy fingers” to the German impersonal pronoun “man”—while unpacking the slipperiness of the German word for “visitor” and the politics of hospitality. This episode ends with Damion discussing an encounter with the most inaccurate—and most insightful—review of his work he’s ever read.

In the last full episode of our first season, we hear scholar, translator, and performer Gitta Honegger discuss her German to English translation of The Children of the Dead, written in 1995 by the Nobel Prize winning author and playwright, Elfriede Jelinek. Considered to be Jelinek’s magnum opus, the 666 page novel takes place at dingy Alpine resort swarming with lacivious, reanimated corpses. Anna dives into the sinuous linguistic body of the translation, reaching the difficult question of collective guilt at its heart. The episode ends with a special reading by Jelinek and Honegger.

How can a translator convey a text that contains troubling, archaic language while still engaging with contemporary readers? Listen in on how Fiona dealt with the historical nuances and present-day challenges posed by a character’s predilection for antisemitic language in her recent translation of Avdotya Panaeva’s 1848 novel, The Talnikov Family.

In this episode, Fiona Bell discusses her translation of The Talnikov Family by Avdotya Panaeva, now out with Columbia University Press. Originally published in 1848, The Talnikov Family fictionalizes Panaeva’s precarious childhood in a family of actors in St. Petersburg. Fiona and Anna discuss bringing 19th century literature to life (if not the 19th century author) and the place of women in the Russian literary canon then and now.

“Truco,” a card game popular in Argentina, is a game of tricks, deception, and power plays. It is also a structuring feature of Martín Kohan’s Confession. Can a translator teach English-language readers the rules?

Daniel Hahn reflects on his translation of Martín Kohan’s Confession (Charco Press), a slim volume that wrestles with personal passions and political complicity. Focused on the legacies of Argentina’s last military dictatorship, the novel opens with the intimate desires of a young girl only to spiral into assassination plots, suppressed memories, and card games played with sky-high emotional stakes.

The action of Did This Hand Kill? (Open Letter Books) largely takes places in Lviv, Ukraine, over several different time frames. In this bonus episode, Sean Gasper Bye adresses the city’s fascinating multicultural, multilingual history and how it impacted his Polish to English translation.

In this episode, Sean Gasper Bye discusses his 2024 translation of Cezary Łazarewicz's true crime thriller, Did This Hand Kill? (Open Letter Books). This historic who dun’ it explores Rita Gorgonowa’s sensational murder trial, a media event that scandalized interwar Poland. Just as the reader visits the lost world of Lwów, they are left wondering who really killed Gorgonowa's de facto stepdaughter on a cold December's night in 1931…

As he translated The Tale of the Wall by Nasser Abu Srour, Luke was faced with a problem: how to convey the realities of a Palestinian refugee camp without blanching the figurative richness of Nasser’s writing. In this bonus episode, Luke tells us about two Arabic words for wall and the English equivalents he chose.

Anna sits down with Luke Leafgren for a conversation about his translation of the Palestinian literary memoir The Tale of a Wall by Nasser Abu Srour, published in April 2024 by Penguin Random House. Anna and Luke dive into urgent topics, discussing the politics of translating Palestinian literature, the challenges of collaborating with an author serving a life sentence in prison, and the groundbreaking qualities of Nasser Abu Srour’s prose, in which literary and philosophical forms inflect a testimony of occupation.

Because ‘mama’ is often the first word we ever learn to say, it can be surprisingly challenging to translate. Jess discusses ‘mama’ and its many synonyms, and fills us in on a humorous run-in with a living author…

Anna meets Jess Jensen Mitchell in Katowice, Poland  —  once a hub of Central Europe’s coal mining industry —  to talk about her translation of Dominika Słowik’s eco-critical short story collection, Self-Sowing. Jess recalls an adventure that led her to publish a story from the collection, “Blizzard”(Two Lines Journal), and how she learned to find humanity in nonhuman characters. She also hints at an upcoming project.

In this episode, Poorna Swami discusses her in-progress Urdu to English translation of Murmurs, a collection of love letters written by Safiya Akhtar. While looking for something to read in her grandmother’s study, Poorna found a scintillating glimpse into the tumultuous romance between the author and her poet husband. Anna and Poorna delve into the challenges of translating elaborate declarations of love into a different language and adapting intimate correspondence for performance and publication. 

In this episode, Poorna Swami discusses her in-progress Urdu to English translation of Murmurs, a collection of love letters written by Safiya Akhtar. While looking for something to read in her grandmother’s study, Poorna found a scintillating glimpse into the tumultuous romance between the author and her poet husband. Anna and Poorna delve into the challenges of translating elaborate declarations of love into a different language and adapting intimate correspondence for performance and publication. 

Kareem discusses the challenges of translating character names rife with meaning or derived from Kurdish encounters with other world cultures.

In this episode, Anna talks to Kareem Abdulrahman about his translation of The Last Pomegranate Tree (Archipelago Books) by Bachtyar Ali. Based in Germany, Bachtyar has received the Nelly Sachs Prize (2017) and the Hilde-Domin-Prize (2023). Kareem’s translation was recently shortlisted for the 2023 National Books Critics Circle Award. Kareem tells us about producing the first-ever English translation of a Kurdish novel, finding the universal in Bachtyar’s prose, and his experience of the Kurdish comedy scene. 

Lara takes us on a journey through Jakarta and Java, exploring the specificity of the Indonesian word “warung.” We learn about the place of the warung in the Indonesian urban ecosystem, its role in Lara’s translation of the novel 24 Hours with Gaspar by Sabda Armandio, and why translators choose to keep words for spaces and food in the original language.

In our premiere, we meet Lara Norgaard to learn about her Indonesian to English translation of the genre-bending crime thriller, 24 Hours with Gaspar (Seagull Books). Lara recalls her first, fateful meeting with Sabda Armandio in a Jakarta coffee shop, as well as her process of conveying the humorous and horrifying word play and web of references that make this novel pop.