The Alan Cheuse International Writers Center and DC Area Literary Translators Network present an evening with renowned literary translators Esther Allen and Sergio Waisman.

Award-winning translator and theorist of translation, Esther Allen, editor of the landmark To Be Translated or Not To Be, will be in conversation with GW professor, novelist and translator Sergio Waisman—a not-to-be missed conversation focused around the theory and practice of translation, and their translations of Argentine writers Antonio Di Benedetto (Allen), and Ricardo Piglia (Waisman).

Esther Allen's translation of Zama, by Antonio Di Benedetto (NYRB), received the National Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association, and was chosen by Publisher's Weekly as one of the twenty best works of fiction published in the U.S. in 2016. She is currently a Guggenheim Fellow, working on translations of two other novels by Di Benedetto. She teaches at City University of New York, and her essays, translations and interviews have appeared in The New York Review Daily, The Paris Review, Words Without Borders, Bomb, LitHub, The New Yorker, and elsewhere (estherallen.com).

Sergio Waisman has translated, among others, The Underdogs: A Novel of the Mexican Revolution by Mariano Azuela (Penguin Classics), three books by the Argentine Ricardo Piglia, and three titles for Oxford’s Library of Latin America series. His book Borges and Translation: The Irreverence of the Periphery has been published in English, Spanish, and Italian. In 2000 he received an NEA Translation Fellowship Award for his translation of Ricardo Piglia’s The Absent City. Sergio Waisman is also the author of the novel Leaving, which he self-translated into Spanish, and published as Irse in Argentina. His latest book is Target in the Night, the translation of Ricardo Piglia’s Blanco nocturno. He is currently translating El limonero real [The Regal Lemon Tree] by Juan José Saer for Open Letter Books, selected short stories by Roberto Arlt, and poetry by Yaki Setton. His novel El encargo is forthcoming in Argentina and Chile.

600 H Street NE, Washington, DC 20002

This event is FREE and open to all. Let us know you’re coming on Facebook.