Lecture | "Daylight at the Exit": Women Translating Kafka

What does it mean for Kafka’s work that the first translations were by women? Join Michelle Woods as she examines this question in a lecture on Milena Jesenská and Willa Muir, and their roles in establishing Kafka as a globally influential writer. For years, both women have been misread and misrepresented: one idealized as Kafka’s lover, the other faulted for the limitations of Kafka’s translations. Woods challenges these characterizations, recentering the lives of these brilliant women in the story of Kafka and discussing their feminist impact on modern perceptions of his works.

Michelle Woods is the author of Kafka Translated: How Translators Have Shaped Our Reading of Kafka (Bloomsbury, 2013); Censoring Translation: Censorship, Theatre and the Politics of Translation (Continuum, 2012); and Translating Milan Kundera (Multilingual Matters, 2006). Half-Irish and half-Czech, she has written several articles on the translation of Czech and Irish literature and film. Her translation of Adolf Hoffmeister’s 1929 interview–and translation lesson for Finnegans Wake–with James Joyce was published in Granta (2005). She has also translated work by the young Czech writers Jakuba Katalpa and Marek Šindelka, both published in Words Without Borders (2014). Woods graduated from Trinity College Dublin and was a Fulbright Fellow (Columbia University) and an IRCHSS Government of Ireland Fellow (Dublin City University). She is an Associate Professor of English at SUNY New Paltz.

This program takes place in Gilder Lehrman Hall on the Ground Floor. Doors to the Hall will open 30 minutes before the lecture begins. Seating is general admission.

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