Lots of Lingo: Strategies for Translating a Heteroglossic Novel

The richly detailed world of Szczepan Twardoch’s 2016 novel Król, published in Sean Gasper Bye’s English translation as The King of Warsaw (Amazon Crossing, 2020) comes to life through gangster talk, boxing lingo, Yiddish dialects, and bad Polish. This session brings Bye together in conversation with Sebastian Schulman, who consulted on the frequent use of Yiddish, as well as Jewish terminology and cultural references, to discuss the strategies employed in this translation. The conversation takes this novel as a starting point for discussing practices relevant to translators working with texts from and about heterogenous places, as well as texts that foreground historical and cultural specificity.

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Moderator

Madeleine Cohen is the Academic Director of the Yiddish Book Center (Amherst, Massachusetts). Her work includes directing a fellowship program for emerging Yiddish literary translators and publishing and promoting Yiddish literature in translation. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley.

Presenters

Sean Gasper Bye translates Polish fiction, reportage, and drama. He is a winner of the Asymptote Close Approximations Prize and a recipient of an NEA translation fellowship. His translations of The King of Warsaw by Szczepan Twardoch and Ellis Island: A People’s History by Małgorzata Szejnert were published in 2020. Sebastian Schulman is a literary translator from Yiddish, Esperanto, and other languages, and the Executive Director of KlezKanada, a leading organization in Yiddish music and culture. His translation of Spomenka Stimec’s Esperanto-language novel Croatian War Nocturnal was published by Phoneme Media in 2017. He lives in Montréal, Québec.