The Future of Translation with Çedilla & Co.
Green Apple Books on the Park | 1231 9th Avenue | San Francisco, California
Five members of Çedilla & Co., a collective of literary translators representing a wide range of writers, languages, and presses, join us to talk about the future of translation and share a little about their current projects.
Sean Gasper Bye’s translations from Polish include The King of Warsaw by Szczepan Twardoch and Ellis Island: A People’s History by Małgorzata Szejnert. He studied Polish at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London and spent five years as literature and humanities curator at the Polish Cultural Institute New York. He is a winner of the Asymptote Close Approximations Prize and a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowship.
Elisabeth Jaquette is a translator from Arabic and Executive Director of Words Without Borders. Her translation of Minor Detail by Palestinian author Adania Shibli was shortlisted for the National Book Award and longlisted for the International Booker Prize. Other translations include Thirteen Months of Sunrise by Sudanese author Rania Mamoun, The Queue by Egyptian author Basma Abdel Aziz, and The Frightened Ones by Syrian author Dima Wannous. Elisabeth’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, McSweeney’s, Words Without Borders, The Common, and World Literature Today, as well as a dozen anthologies. Formerly, she was Executive Director of the American Literary Translators Association.
Julia Sanches is a translator of Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan. She has translated works by Susana Moreira Marques, Dolores Reyes, Daniel Galera, and Eva Baltasar, among others. Her shorter translations have appeared in various magazines and periodicals, including Words Without Borders, Granta, Tin House, and Guernica. A founding member of Cedilla & Co., Julia sits on the Council of the Authors Guild.
Jeremy Tiang is a novelist, playwright and Sinophone translator. Recent translations include Liu Xinwu’s The Wedding Party, which was shortlisted for the National Translation Award, as well as novels by Zhang Yueran, Shuang Xuetao, Lo Yi-Chin, Yan Ge and Yeng Pway Ngon. Their novel State of Emergency won the Singapore Literature Prize in 2018. Earlier this year they were the Princeton University Translator-in-Residence, and served on the jury of the International Booker Prize. Originally from Singapore, they live in Flushing, Queens.
Jeffrey Zuckerman is a translator of French, including the Mauritian novelists Ananda Devi, Shenaz Patel, and Carl de Souza, whose Kaya Days has been shortlisted for a PEN Translation Prize. In 2020 he was named a Chevalier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.