Crossing Borders: Stories and Essays About Translation

A collection of stories and essays about translating and translators

What an astonishing collection, it seemed as if I could drink it–these pieces exude such humanness, refer effortlessly to the tender place that exists in between languages, and somehow leave you with both everything and nothing to say. –Ella Frances Sanders, author of Lost in Translation

In Joyce Carol Oates’s story The Translation, a traveler to an Eastern European country falls in love with a woman he gets to know through an interpreter. In Lydia Davis’s French Lesson I- Le Meurtre, what begins as a lesson in beginner’s French takes a sinister turn. In the essay On Translating and Being Translated, Primo Levi addresses the joys and difficulties awaiting the translator. Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s Crossing Borders- Stories and Essays About Translation gathers together thirteen stories and five essays that explore the compromises, misunderstandings, traumas, and reconciliations we act out and embody through the art of translation.