Translation Workshop with Lisa Dillman, Heather Cleary and Natasha Wimmer

Natasha Wimmer

Natasha Wimmer is a translator of contemporary fiction and literary nonfiction from Spanish to English. She spent four formative years in Spain as a child and concentrated in Romance Languages and Literature as an undergraduate at Harvard University. She is a regular visiting lecturer at Princeton University and Columbia University, and she has written reviews and criticism for The Believer, The New York Times, and The Nation, among other publications. She is the recipient of an NEA Translation Grant, a PEN Translation Award, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and two children.

Lisa Dillman

Lisa Dillman is Professor of Pedagogy and Director of the Honors Program in Spanish at Emory University. She is co-editor (with Peter Bush) of the book Spain: A Literary Traveler’s Companion and has translated many novels and scholarly works, including Zigzag (by José Carlos Somoza), The Scroll of Seduction (by Gioconda Belli), Pot Pourri: Whistlings of a Vagabond (by Eugenio Cambaceres), Op Oloop (by Juan Filloy), The Mule, by Juan Eslava Galán (the original novel was turned into a motion picture), Critical Dictionary of Mexican Literature (by Christopher Domínguez Michael), The Frost on His Shoulders (by Lorenzo Mediano), Me, Who Dove into the Heart of the World (by Sabina Berman). She also co-translated The Polish Boxer (by Eduardo Halfon) with a team of five (Ollie Brock, Daniel Hahn, Thomas Bunstead and Ann McLean) and his novel Monastery with Daniel Hahn. Most recently, she has translated several works by Andrés Barba (After the Rain; August, October; Death of a Horse; and Such Small Hands) as well as Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World and The Transmigration of Bodies. In 2016 she won the Best Translated Book Award for Signs Preceding the End of the World.

Heather Cleary

Heather Cleary is a translator and writer based in New York and Mexico City. Her essays and literary criticism have appeared in Two Lines, Lit Hub, and Words Without Borders, among other publications. She is the author of the recent book The Translator’s Visibility: Scenes from Contemporary Latin American Fiction, which shows how narratives of translation can challenge norms of intellectual property and propriety. Her translations include Brenda Lozano’s Witches, Betina González’s American Delirium, María Ospina’s Variations on the Body, Roque Larraquy’s Comemadre (nominee, National Book Award 2018), Sergio Chejfec’s The Planets (finalist, Best Translated Book Award 2013) and The Dark (nominee, ALTA’s National Translation Award 2014), and Poems to Read on a Streetcar, a selection of Girondo’s poetry published by New Directions (recipient, PEN and Programa SUR translation grants).