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Karen Emmerich is a translator of modern Greek literature and a scholar of comparative literature and translation studies who is on faculty at Princeton University. She has published over 20 book-length translations, including novels, short story collections, poetry, and drama. Her translation awards include the National Translation Award for Ersi Sotiropoulos’s novel What’s Left of the Night, the Best Translated Book Award for Eleni Vakalo’s Beyond Lyricism, and the PEN Poetry in Translation Award for Yannis Ritsos’s Diaries of Exile (co-translated with Edmund Keeley), while her translations of the short fiction of Christos Ikonomou (Good Will Come From the Sea and Something Will Happen, You’ll See) were instrumental in helping him win the inaugural Chowdhury Prize in Literature in 2022. One recent translation of which she is particularly fond is Alki Zei’s 1963 classic Wildcat Behind Glass, a novel for young readers about the rise of fascism in Greece, and in Europe more broadly, in the 1930s, told from the perspective of an eight-year-old girl.

Emmerich is also the author of Literary Translation and the Making of Originals (2017), which invites translators and scholars of translation to consider the ways that the textual instability of literary works affects the task of translation: after all, the textual makeup of a “source text” is often no more stable than its meaning. On the contrary, translation regularly involves decisions about what constitutes the text to be translated, including the selection (or creation) of an“original” from multiple versions or editions of a work. The case studies treated in this book are wide-ranging, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to folk songs and the oral tradition to the unfinished, unpublished works of Emily Dickinson and C.P. Cavafy to Jack Spicer’s (pseudo)translations of Federico García Lorca.

Emmerich is currently finishing another scholarly book, tentatively titled Forms of Belonging: Citizenship, Migration, and the Modern Greek Literary Sphere, which probes the connection between literary and legal modes of belonging in Greece. In thinking of nationality, citizenship, and literary belonging together, and in stressing the incessant movement of so many of the writers whose work has been granted entry into the Greek literary sphere, the book seeks to denaturalize the category “Greek writer” and to recognize the ways in which the construction of that literary sphere has interacted with shifting legal frameworks and sociopolitical understandings of who counts as Greek. This year she is living in Athens, but her permanent home is in Brooklyn.