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Conversations with Susan Bernofsky, Part 3

June 2, 2016 - By Ryan Mihaly and Susan Bernofsky

The conclusion of a conversation with translator Susan Bernofsky. Read Part One here, and Part Two here.

Ryan Mihaly: The Metamorphosis and Robert Walser’s Microscripts both deal with these cramped spaces – Microscripts being these texts written on the back of business cards, newspapers, pamphlets, and so on. And both Walser and Kafka write in this old, highly formal style, which comes off as very comical in English.

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Conversations with Susan Bernofsky, Part 2

June 1, 2016 - By Ryan Mihaly and Susan Bernofsky

Part Two of a conversation with translator Susan Bernofsky. Read Part One here.

Ryan Mihaly: When did you begin working on Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, and to what extent did you consult the various other English translations?

Susan Bernofsky: I started working on it, I think, in the spring of 2013, about a year before it came out. When I got offered the job to do that translation, the first thing I did was run to the...

Conversations with Susan Bernofsky, Part One

May 30, 2016 - By Ryan Mihaly and Susan Bernofsky

Ryan Mihaly: You recently translated The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck, the fourth work of hers that you’ve translated. It seems that the more books she publishes in German, the quicker you translate them into English. How important is it for you to translate her books quickly?

Susan Bernofsky: It’s funny, it doesn’t seem that it’s going that quick to me. The End of Days came out in German in 2012, and I’m hyper-conscious that it...

Snapshots of Romania

May 23, 2016 - By Rachel Hall

A Review of King of the Gypsies, a short story collection by Lenore Myka (BkMk Press, 2015).

In praise of linked story collections, Michael Chabon has said: “A group of linked narratives can create an effect you can’t get from a novel or from one story alone. It’s like a series of snapshots taken over time. Part of the pleasure...

Above and Against the Heroic

May 4, 2016 - By Jeffrey Wallen

The movie Son of Saul, which has received very positive reviews, immerses us in a few days of the life of a member of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz-Birkenau. They were responsible for helping shepherd the Jews into the gas chambers, and for disposing of their corpses, after first gleaning what was valuable from them (gold fillings, hair from the women). Primo Levi writes, “Conceiving and organizing these squads was National Socialism’s most demonic crime.”

In the movie, we are almost always with the main character Saul, and we quickly come to sympathize with him, and with his quest to provide a proper Jewish burial for a boy who for a short time miraculously survived...