Susan Bernofsky reads an excerpt from her translation of  Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear at the 2018 Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference.

Susan Bernofsky directs the program Literary Translation at Columbia in the MFA Writing Program in the Columbia University School of the Arts. Among her many published translations are retranslations of Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha (2006), Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (2014), and Jeremias Gotthelf’s The Black Spider (2013). She specializes in the work of the great Swiss-German modernist author Robert Walser—she has translated eight of his books, including Microscripts, Berlin Stories, The Walk, and Looking at Pictures, and is currently writing his biography for Yale University Press.

Bernofsky’s 2014 translation of Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel The End of Days won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, The Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize, the Ungar Award for Literary Translation, and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. In 2014 she was named a Guggenheim Fellow. Her previous awards include the 2006 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize and the 2012 Hermann Hesse Translation Prize of the City of Calw, as well as grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the PEN Translation Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the CUNY Graduate Center, and the Lannan Foundation. She blogs about translation at www.translationista.com. More information at www.susanbernofsky.com.

All Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference readings are available online. To hear more, please visit the Bread Loaf website.