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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get ac...

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 translat...

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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus epis...

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. This is a public episo...

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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus...

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 Spen...

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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.paraphrasispodcast.com

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-f...

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 an...

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. This is a public...

In this episode, Adam Mahler discusses his translation of Shem Tov Ardutiel’s Moral Proverbs and Other Old Castilian Poems of Jewish Authorship (forthcoming from the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library at Harvard University Press). This collection captures the flourishing of Jewish poetry written in Old Spanish during the medieval period. Adam delves into the linguistic texture of this Old Castilian v...

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 the second edition of the series, guest host Jess Jensen Mitchell sits down with two alumnae of the college, Professors Moira Weigel of Harvard University, and Pelin Kivrak of E...

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...

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 s...

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 Harv...

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,” ske...

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....

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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.parap...

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...

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. An...

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 . This is a public episode. If you would like to di...

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...

“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? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.paraphrasispodcast.com

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 stake...

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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus epi...