Practical Translation: Proust

The first 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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In 1999, twelve distinguished translators and writers—including Margaret Jull Costa, Seamus Heaney, and Tim Parks—gathered at a villa on Lake Como to discuss the art of translation. They talked about what makes one translation better or worse than another, translation as a practice of interpretation, and translation as a political act. Twenty-five years later, their ideas are still relevant and powerful, but the world of literary translation has evolved, both as an art form and as an arm of the global publishing industry. The market for translation has grown in both its reach and its prestige. New publishing houses have entered the scene. So have new translators, from a wide variety of backgrounds with broader ideas about translation.