Day of Translation 2025: Interspecies Translation
Susan Bernofsky, Bonnie Chau, Anelise Chen (Clam Down, One World), and Kate Zambreno explore what translation can teach us about understanding the animal world and vice versa in a conversation moderated by Dr. Elisha Cohn.
On Thursday, September 18, 2025, Center for the Art of Translation presented its annual Day of Translation at The Center for Fiction in Brooklyn, NY. This panel, featuring Susan Bernofsky (translator of Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear, New Directions), Bonnie Chau (All Roads Lead to Blood, 2040 Books), Anelise Chen (Clam Down, One World), and Kate Zambreno (Animal Stories, Transit Books), moderated by Dr. Elisha Cohn, begins with the idea of how the languages of the animal, aquatic, and/or natural world can inform the way we understand narrative and storytelling.
What is gained in narrating from the perspective of a polar bear, a clam, or famously, a cockroach? Is it more freeing to be a clam than a woman? What happens to a polar bear’s voice when it’s translated both across species and across languages? Will we ever be able to understand animal language? Will they ever understand ours?