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The Critic and Her Publics

The Critic and Her Publics

By: Merve Emre
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 Welcome to Season Three of The Critic and Her Publics: On Translation. In 1999, twelve distinguished writers gathered at Casa Ecco, a villa on Lake Como, to discuss the art of translation. Twenty-five years later, their ideas are still apt and powerful. Last October, Merve Emre convened a group of translators and publishers at the same villa to return to those ideas and to examine a field at an inflection point. In this series, you’ll hear from the translators Maureen Freely, Daisy Rockwell, Virginia Jewiss, Jeremy Tiang, and Tiffany Tsao, as well as publishers Adam Levy (Transit Books) and Jacques Testard (Fitzcarraldo Editions). Hosted by Merve Emre • Edited by Michele Moses • Music by Dani Lencioni • Art by Leanne Shapton This Como Conversazione season of The Critic and Her Publics is a co-production between the Hawthornden Foundation, New York Review of Books, and Lit Hub.2025 Art Literary History & Criticism
Episodes
  • Money

    Money
    Aug 30 2025
    In this final episode of Hawthornden's Como Conversazione series for 2025, we’ll confront a subject that the literary world likes to keep subtextual: money. The translators and publishers, who usually meet over contract negotiations, open up their books and compare bottom lines, to see who feels like they’re being short-changed, and why. Is there—or could there be—a pay structure that works for everyone? And how should the translator be compensated, when their role is still so unresolved?
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    46 mins
  • Judgement

    Judgement
    Aug 29 2025
    How do we decide which translations are better than others? In this episode of Hawthornden's Como Conversazione, Jacques Testard of Fitzcarraldo Editions and Adam Levy of Transit Books reveal how they evaluate books for acquisition. And, because so many of the guests on this show have served on prize juries, we compare our experiences making judgments that can seem at once arbitrary and hugely consequential.
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    56 mins
  • Practical Translation: 1,001 Nights

    Practical Translation: 1,001 Nights
    Aug 28 2025
    In this episode of Hawthornden's Como Conversazione, another session of practical translation: the reading and comparing of many renditions of one passage, to see how translators make their choices. But the text we’ll be examining, 1001 Nights, presents an unusual challenge. Unlike with the Proust that we discussed in the first episode, there is not one fixed source text to work with. There were many retellings of Scheherazade’s tales over the centuries, which were then written down as many different manuscripts. What, then, does it mean for a translator to “take liberties,” or to be “faithful to the text”?
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    39 mins
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