Is English a Monocrop?

The fourth episode of “On Translation”

In “On Translation,” the third season of the podcast The Critic and Her Publics, Merve Emre convenes a panel of translators and publishers for a seven-episode series of conversations on literary translation. The panel discussions were hosted in 2024 by the Hawthornden Foundation. The Review is collaborating with Lit Hub to publish transcripts and recordings of each episode. Previous episodes can be found here.

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For reasons both aesthetic and historic, the English language can flatten the literature of other nations, while at the same time expanding its audience many times over. For the translator, this creates a struggle. What might it look like to enshrine that struggle in the translation itself?

In this conversation, the translators discuss the particular qualities and capacities of the languages they translate from and the challenges of replicating them in English.