In this article People from Bloomington Budi Darma Tiffany Tsao
By Merve Emre, originally published in The New York Review
Aug 26, 2025
Read the full article here.
By Merve Emre, originally published in The New York Review
Aug 26, 2025
Shame, Seams, Scars
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.
Translation demands a deep and scholarly knowledge of language, which never feels sufficient. Translators are often faced with the decision between making themselves invisible or asserting their styles. Many of them are caught between identities. Maureen Freely, an American who grew up in Istanbul, had a vexed relationship with the work of Orhan Pamuk while Tiffany Tsao, American-born but of Indonesian heritage, felt shame when translating short stories by Budi Darma. All of the translators in this conversation, for reasons of temperament and structure, seem to have a masochistic relationship to their work. But as in masochism, the pain is a kind of pleasure, too.
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.
Translation demands a deep and scholarly knowledge of language, which never feels sufficient. Translators are often faced with the decision between making themselves invisible or asserting their styles. Many of them are caught between identities. Maureen Freely, an American who grew up in Istanbul, had a vexed relationship with the work of Orhan Pamuk while Tiffany Tsao, American-born but of Indonesian heritage, felt shame when translating short stories by Budi Darma. All of the translators in this conversation, for reasons of temperament and structure, seem to have a masochistic relationship to their work. But as in masochism, the pain is a kind of pleasure, too.
Read the full article here.
Leanne Shapton / NYBooks
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