Paraphrasis Podcast

<p>Spencer Lee-Lenfield brings us Biologicity (Black Ocean, 2024) by South Korean poet Shin Hae-uk, a collection with offbeat turns, twisted logic, and sudden switches in vocabulary. Spencer walks us through how to...

<p>What happens when a title becomes too familiar? Mark Harman defends his decision to ditch “The Metamorphosis” for “The Transformation”—a shift that scraps the Latinate gloss, restores fidelity to Kafka’s voice, and...

<p>Mark Harman returns to Kafka with Selected Stories (Harvard University Press, 2024), a collection that combines courtroom logic with surrealist punchlines. We discuss Kafka’s subtle irony, the mysteries tucked behind...

<p>During the 2024-25 academic year, the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard celebrated its departmental anniversary—and Paraphrasis is launching a series of summer special episodes to commemorate the...

<p>What’s in a name? How do you translate a poet’s name that appears in multiple forms: sometimes in Hebrew as “the good name,” sometimes in various Spanish renderings, used by the poet himself for the sake of his rhyme...

<p>In this episode, Adam Mahler discusses his translation of Shem Tov Ardutiel’s Moral Proverbs and Other Old Castilian Poems of Jewish Authorship (forthcoming from the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library at Harvard...

<p>During the 2024-25 academic year, the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard celebrated its departmental anniversary—and Paraphrasis is launching a series of summer special episodes to commemorate the...

<p>What’s it like to tame an unruly stanza? And what happens when you’re tasked with translating an erratically rhymed Soviet-era poem, complete with dirt-caked children and a state-dispatched bath squad? In this bonus...

<p>In this episode, Anna speaks with Miriam Udel about Honey on the Page (NYU Press), her 2021 anthology of Yiddish children’s literature from the 20th century. A project born of her roles as Yiddish scholar, teacher...

<p>During the 2024-25 academic year, the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard celebrated its departmental anniversary—and Paraphrasis is launching a series of summer special episodes to commemorate the...

<p>What is a title? For Anton Hur, it’s “the most liberated thing” in a translator’s toolkit. Listen in on how Your Utopia got its name, as a blunt-sounding gerund in the English was traded in for something with sharper...

<p>In this episode, translator and debut novelist Anton Hur discusses his English translation of Your Utopia (Algonquin Books, 2024), a fantastical and moving collection by South Korean author Bora Chung. From...

<p>Why do German nouns seem to bristle with energy while English ones feel flat? And how did he land on Overstaying—a title that’s as pushy and off-kilter as the novel itself? Damion takes us behind the decision to swap...

<p>Damion Searls reflects on his translation of Overstaying, Swiss author Ariane Koch’s surreal debut novel (Dorothy Project, 2024). He talks through the book’s oddball humor and syntactic sleights—from “brushy fingers”...

<p>In the last full episode of our first season, we hear scholar, translator, and performer Gitta Honegger discuss her German to English translation of The Children of the Dead, written in 1995 by the Nobel Prize...