In this article People from Bloomington Budi Darma Tiffany Tsao
By Merve Emre, originally published in The New York Review
Aug 28, 2025
Read the full article here.
By Merve Emre, originally published in The New York Review
Aug 28, 2025
The fifth 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.
Today’s conversation is another session of practical translation: the reading and comparing of many renditions of one passage to try and understand how translators make their choices. But the text we’ll be examining, The Thousand and One Nights, presents an unusual challenge. Unlike Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, which we discussed in the first episode of “On Translation,” there is not a fixed source text to work with. There have been countless retellings of Scheherazade’s tales over the centuries, many of which were written down, leaving many different manuscripts. What, then, does it mean for a translator to “take liberties,” or to be “faithful to the text”?
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.
Today’s conversation is another session of practical translation: the reading and comparing of many renditions of one passage to try and understand how translators make their choices. But the text we’ll be examining, The Thousand and One Nights, presents an unusual challenge. Unlike Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, which we discussed in the first episode of “On Translation,” there is not a fixed source text to work with. There have been countless retellings of Scheherazade’s tales over the centuries, many of which were written down, leaving many different manuscripts. What, then, does it mean for a translator to “take liberties,” or to be “faithful to the text”?
Read the full article here.
Leanne Shapton / NYBooks
Other Episodes
Practical Translation: Proust
Aug 24, 2025
First Sentences
Aug 25, 2025
Shame, Seams, Scars
Aug 26, 2025
Is English a Monocrop?
Aug 27, 2025
Passing Judgment
Aug 29, 2025
