2025 Day of Translation

Clear

Thursday, 12:30 pm EDT - 5:00 pm EDT September 18, 2025

The Center for Fiction
& Livestreamed

Event admission is free from 12–5pm ET. Registration is required to attend the panel events in person and to access the livestream, but please note that seating is limited and available on a first-come, first-seated basis.

Tickets are required for this year’s Keynote Conversation with Jhumpa Lahiri and Katie Kitamura at 6pm ET, and advance purchases are highly recommended due to space constraints. Please note that the keynote event will not be livestreamed.

September is National Translation Month, a time to celebrate the art of translation and the role of translators in connecting cultures and making international literature accessible. On Thursday, September 18, 2025, the Center for the Art of Translation will present its annual capstone event, the Day of Translation, at The Center for Fiction in Brooklyn, New York.

The Day of Translation connects readers of literary translation, literary translators at every stage of their careers, and anyone interested in the movement of ideas among languages, cultures, people, and places. This day of conversations about language and literature features provocative panels on translation, broadly defined, and culminates in a Keynote Conversation featuring Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jhumpa Lahiri and bestselling author Katie Kitamura (purchase tickets for the Keynote here).

This year’s panels include “Resistance Translation,” a reflection on how translation can help subvert dominant narratives, amplify marginalized voices, and serve as a necessary act of resistance between writing and translating by extending the purview of resistance literature; “Meeting the Present Moment” on translators navigating cultural taboos, censorships and establishing solidarity; and “Interspecies Translation,” a conversation that 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. Panels will be livestreamed worldwide.

This year’s panelists are Stine An, Susan Bernofsky, Bonnie Chau, Anelise Chen, Elisha Cohn, Eirill Alvilde Falck, Anton Hur, Chenxin Jiang, Khaled Rajeh, Parisa Saranj, Jenna Tang, and Kate Zambreno.

Support for this program provided by Faranak Adibi Foundation with special thanks to Mina Hamedi.

Schedule

12pm Doors

12:30–1pm Welcome & Introductions

1–2pm
Resistance Translation: The Ethics, Aesthetics, and Politics of Translating Resistance Literature
How do translators navigate the complex responsibility of serving as political agents while recreating both the aesthetics and the inherent purpose of resistance literature? What strategies enable translators to work toward liberation without catering to colonial tastes? How do you bring Palestinian literature to English readers when those readers are part of the system Palestinian writers are pushing back against?

Writer, translator, and performer Stine An, writer and translator Eirill Alvilde Falck, and writer and translator Khaled Rajeh will share case studies from their work, analyzing problematic translations and examining literary translation’s role in anti-colonial struggles from Palestine to Hong Kong. Moderated by award-winning translator Chenxin Jiang, this conversation will focus on how translation can subvert dominant narratives, amplify marginalized voices, and serve as a necessary act of resistance.

2:30–3:30pm
Meeting the Present Moment: On Translators Navigating Cultural Taboos, Censorships, and Establishing Solidarity
With the rising number of book bans, political scrutiny of education and libraries, and refugees and migrants in limbo across the United States, how do translators navigate linguistic and ideological borders? What does it mean to translate literature in a time of growing censorship and cultural polarization? How can translators respond to book challenges, publisher hesitations, and various aspects of censorship, including self-censorship?

Writer and award-winning translator Anton Hur, writer and Persian translator Parisa Saranj, and writer and translator between Chinese, French, Spanish and English Jenna Tang will discuss what it means, in concrete terms, to establish or contribute to one’s community through translation and how to deal with recurring issues such as exploitation and burnout.

4–5pm
Interspecies Translation
What is gained in narrating from the perspective of a polar bear, a clam, or famously, a cockroach? This panel explores the idea of “interspecies translation” and how the languages of the animal, aquatic, and otherwise natural world inform the way we approach narrative and storytelling. 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?

Join 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, forthcoming from Transit Books), in a conversation about what translation can teach us about understanding the animal world and vice versa. Moderated by Dr. Elisha Cohn (Milieu: A Creaturely Theory of the Contemporary Novel, Stanford University Press).

5–6pm Break
Ticket holders will need to exit and re-enter for the Keynote event. Proof of purchase required. The venue will release waitlist and walk-in tickets on a first-come, first-served basis, if available. The keynote conversation will not be livestreamed.

6–7pm
Keynote Conversation with Jhumpa Lahiri and Katie Kitamura
For more information about the Keynote and to purchase tickets, please click here.

Featuring

Stine An

Stine An

Stine An is a poet, translator, and performer in NYC whose work explores diasporic poetics, experimental translation, and virtual performance. Her poems and translations appear in Best Literary Translations 2024, Poem-a-Day, Poetry Daily, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. A 2024 NEA Translation Fellow, Stine is the author of SMMER CRSH (Sarabande Books, 2025) and the translator of Today’s Morning Vocabulary by Yoo Heekyung (Zephyr Press, 2025).
Susan Bernofsky

Susan Bernofsky

Susan Bernofsky is the translator of works by Robert Walser, Yoko Tawada, Jenny Erpenbeck, Franz Kafka, and Hermann Hesse. A Guggenheim, Cullman, and Berlin Prize fellow, she directs the program in literary translation in the School of the Arts at Columbia University. Her book Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser, was a finalist for the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography.
Bonnie Chau

Bonnie Chau

Bonnie Chau is the author of the short story collection All Roads Lead to Blood, and a contributor to Nineteen Ways of Looking at Awono, a recent anthology of nineteen different translations of a poem by Cameroonian writer Jean-Claude Awono. Her writing has appeared in The Offing, Joyland, Flaunt, Two Lines, Fence, Bennington Review, Black Sun Lit, and elsewhere, and she has received fellowships from Kundiman, Vermont Studio Center, Millay Colony, Black Mountain Institute, and the Stadler Center. She works as an editor at 4Columns, the Evergreen Review, and Public Books; teaches creative writing and translation; and serves on the boards of ALTA and Art Farm Nebraska.
Anelise Chen

Anelise Chen

Anelise Chen is the author of the novel So Many Olympic Exertions, a finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. She is a 5 Under 35 Honoree from the National Book Foundation. Her most recent book, Clam Down: A Metamorphosis, published in June, is a memoir about a woman who turns into a clam during a painful separation. Chen is currently an associate professor of creative writing at Columbia University. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut, with her family.

Photo Credit: Lemia Bodden
Elisha Cohn

Elisha Cohn

Elisha Cohn is Professor in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University and author of Milieu: A Creaturely Theory of The Contemporary Novel (2025), Still Life: Suspended Development in the Victorian Novel (2016), and essays, most recently appearing in Public Books and Post-45 Contemporaries.
Eirill Alvilde Falck

Eirill Alvilde Falck

Eirill Alvilde Falck is a Norwegian-born writer and translator who lives in the United States. Her work has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Poetry Magazine, and the anthology Best Literary Translations. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, where she was later a Zell Fellow. She was a 2020-2022 Iowa Arts Fellow at the University of Iowa, where she completed a master’s degree in Literary Translation. While at the University of Iowa, she received the Stanley Award for International Research for her work on translations of Edvard Munch’s journals. She is the recipient of the John Wagner Prize and the Hopwood Award, and has received support from the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation, the Clarion Foundation, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. Eirill is the co-founder of MQR: Mixtape, an imprint of Michigan Quarterly Review.

Photo Credit: Monica Sweiss
Anton Hur

Anton Hur

Anton Hur is the author of Toward Eternity and the translator of various works of Korean literature into English including the National Book Award-finalist Cursed Bunny and the Dublin Literary Award-longlisted Love in the Big City. He resides in Seoul.

Photo Credit: Anton Hur
Chenxin Jiang

Chenxin Jiang

Chenxin Jiang (she/her) translates from Italian, German, and Chinese. Her most recent translation is for now I am sitting here growing transparent by Yau Ching for Zephyr Press. Other books include the PEN/Heim-winning The Cowshed by Ji Xianlin for New York Review Books and Tears of Salt by Pietro Bartolo and Lidia Tilotta for MacLehose and Norton, shortlisted for the Italian Prose in Translation Award. Chenxin grew up in Hong Kong and is now based in Denver; she serves as president of the board for the American Literary Translators Association.
Khaled Rajeh

Khaled Rajeh

Khaled Rajeh is a writer and literary translator from Baakleen, Lebanon. His essays and translations have appeared in ArabLit, Vagabond City, 91st Meridian, and the Michigan Quarterly Review. He holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa, where he is pursuing a PhD.
Parisa Saranj

Parisa Saranj

Parisa Saranj is a writer and Persian translator. Her literary translations have appeared in various print and online journals, including Los Angeles Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Faultline, Asymptote, and Two Lines. She has also translated two books, Empty and Me: A Tale of Loss and Friendship (Lee & Low, 2023) by Azam Mahdavi and Women, Life, Freedom: Our Fight for Human Rights and Equality in Iran (Cornell University Press, 2023) by Nasrin Sotoudeh and two documentaries, Nasrin (2020) and Sansur (2023), on women’s rights in Iran.
Jenna Tang

Jenna Tang

Jenna Tang is a Taiwanese Hakka writer and a translator translating between Mandarin, French, Spanish, and English. Her translations and essays are published in The Paris Review, Lit Hub, Fare Magazine, Latin American Literature Today, AAWW, McSweeney’s, Catapult, and elsewhere. Her interviews can be found at World Literature Today, The Sunrise Times, Okapi, Openbook, and Words Without Borders. Her translations include works from Taiwanese feminist authors, Lin Yi-Han (Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise), Lâu Tsí-û (“Not Your Child”), Leah Yang, and more. She has given talks about translation, languages, and gender movements across 25 universities in the States, Canada, China, and Taiwan.

Photo Credit: Joanna Tillman
Kate Zambreno

Kate Zambreno

Kate Zambreno is the author most recently of Animal Stories, a collection on zoos and Kafka, part of Transit Books’ Undelivered Lectures series. A paperback of The Light Room is also published this month from Transit. Two novels, Foam and Performance Art, are forthcoming from Semiotext(e) in 2026 and 2027. They are a Ph.D. candidate in Performance Studies at NYU.

Photo Credit: Heather Sten

About Our Partners

The Center for the Art of Translation is dedicated to finding dazzling new, overlooked, and underrepresented voices, brought into English by the best translators, and to celebrating the art of translation. Our publications, events, and educational programming enrich the library of vital literary works, nurture and promote the work of translators, build audiences for literature in translation, and honor the incredible linguistic and cultural diversity of our schools and our world.

Visit catranslation.org for more.