Day of Translation 2024: Fiction and Translation
Jennifer Croft, Bruna Dantas Lobato, Lily Meyer, and Idra Novey discuss the connections and boundaries between writing and translating.
On September 26, 2024, the Center for the Art of Translation presented its annual Day of Translation, co-hosted by The Center for Fiction in Brooklyn and livestreamed worldwide. This panel, featuring Jennifer Croft, Bruna Dantas Lobato, Lily Meyer, and Idra Novey, brings together acclaimed literary translators who have recently published their own works of fiction to investigate how their backgrounds as translators impact their work as fiction writers.
What is the relationship between translation and creative writing? Is all writing, in fact, a translation of sorts? This panel investigates the connections and boundaries between writing and translating, how one informs the other, and what happens when you do both.
Jennifer Croft won a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship for her novel The Extinction of Irena Rey, the 2020 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for her illustrated memoir Homesick, and the 2018 International Booker Prize for her translation from Polish of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights. She is also the translator of Federico Falco’s A Perfect Cemetery, Romina Paula’s August, Pedro Mairal’s The Woman from Uruguay, and Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob (a finalist for the Kirkus Prize). In 2023, she received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. She lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with her husband and twins.
Bruna Dantas Lobato is a fiction writer and translator. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Guernica, A Public Space, and The Common. She was awarded the 2023 National Book Award in Translated Literature for The Words that Remain by Stênio Gardel. Originally from Natal, Brazil, she lives in Iowa and teaches at Grinnell College. Her debut novel, Blue Light Hours, is forthcoming in October 2024 from Grove Atlantic.
Lily Meyer is a translator and critic, and the author of the novel Short War. A contributing writer at The Atlantic, her translations include Claudia Ulloa Donoso’s story collections Little Bird and Ice for Martians. Her novel The End of Romance is forthcoming from Viking.
Idra Novey is a novelist, poet, and translator. Her new book of poems, Soon & Wholly, is out this September. Her most recent novel, Take What You Need, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2023, a finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and longlisted for the Dublin Literary Prize. She has translated various Brazilian and Chilean authors and is the co-translator with Ahmad Nadalizadeh of Iranian poet Garous Abdolmalekian’s Lean Against This Late Hour, a finalist for the PEN America Poetry in Translation Prize in 2021. Her fiction and poetry have been translated into a dozen languages and she’s written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. She teaches creative writing at Princeton University.
