Susan Bernofsky’s literary translations include six works of fiction by the great Swiss-German modernist author Robert Walser, as well as novels and poetry by Jenny Erpenbeck, Yoko Tawada, Gregor von Rezzori, Uljana Wolf and others. She chairs the PEN Translation Committee and is co-editor (with Esther Allen) of the forthcoming Columbia University Press anthology In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means. She received the 2006 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize and the 2012 Calw Hermann Hesse Translation Prize as well as awards and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the PEN Translation Fund, the NEA, the NEH and the Lannan Foundation. She is currently writing a biography of Robert Walser as a fellow of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the CUNY Graduate Center, as well as preparing a new translation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis for Norton. She also blogs about translation at www.translationista.org.
photo / Caroline White