Upcoming Translation Events (Virtual & In-Person): September 2025
Tuesday, September 2:
Translator Kalpana Raina reads at First Tuesdays in Jackson Heights | Kalpana Raina, who translated HK Kaul’s For Now It is Night from the Kashmiri alongside Gowhar Fazili, Gowhar Yaquoob, and Tanveer Ajsi will read as part of First Tuesdays in Jackson Heights. In-person. Hosted by First Tuesdays. More info here. 7:00 p.m. - 8:30 p.m. (ET)
Thursday, September 4:
In Farthest Seas by Lalla Romano with Brian Robert Moore and Jhumpa Lahiri | Join us for a conversation with Brian Robert Moore to celebrate his translation of In Farthest Seas by Lalla Romano, a “lacerating, luminous” Italian author (Jhumpa Lahiri). He'll be speaking with Pulitzer Prize winning author Jhumpa Lahiri, followed by a signing. In-person. Hosted by Rizzoli Bookstore. More info here and here. 6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m. (ET)
Tuesday, September 9:
Maya Arad celebrates Happy New Years with Gal Beckerman and translator Jessica Cohen | Please join us at the Barnes & Noble Upper West Side in welcoming Maya Arad discussing and signing Happy New Years, with Gal Beckerman and translator Jessica Cohen. A purchase of Happy New Years from Barnes & Noble Upper West Side is required to join the signing line at this event. Please call ahead and speak to a bookseller and reserve your copy. In-person. Hosted by Barnes & Noble Upper West Side. More info here. Starts at 7:00 p.m. (ET)
Wednesday, September 17:
On Being in Between: Postcards, Pregnancy, Travel, and Translation | Writer and literary translator Jennifer Croft won a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship for her novel The Extinction of Irena Rey, the 2020 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for her illustrated memoir Homesick and the 2018 International Booker Prize for her translation from Polish of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights. She is also the translator of Federico Falco’s A Perfect Cemetery, Romina Paula’s August, Pedro Mairal’s The Woman from Uruguay, and Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob (a finalist for the Kirkus Prize). In 2023, she received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. She lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma with her husband and twins.In-person. Hosted by Literary Translation at Columbia (LTAC). More info here. 7:30 p.m. - 9:00 p.m. (ET)
Thursday, September 18:
Day of Translation 2025 | September is National Translation Month, a time to celebrate the art of translation and the role of translators in connecting cultures and making international literature accessible. On Thursday, September 18, 2025, Center for the Art of Translation will present its 6th annual capstone event, the Day of Translation, at The Center for Fiction in Brooklyn, NY. In-person. Hosted by the Center for the Art of Translation. The Day of Translation connects readers of literary translation; literary translators at every stage of their careers; and anyone interested in the movement of ideas among languages, cultures, people, and places. This day of conversations about language and literature features provocative panels on translation, broadly defined, and culminates in a keynote conversation featuring Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Jhumpa Lahiri and best-selling author Katie Kitamura. More info here. 12:00 p.m. - 7:00 p.m. (ET)
Friday, September 19:
Writing the World from Copenhagen to NYC | Join us on September 19 for a conversation on “Writing the World from Copenhagen to NYC”! This program presents the work of four talented early-career writers who have been selected by faculty at Forfatterskolen, Copenhagen, and the Columbia University School of the Arts, New York, to represent the best of new writing in Danish and English: Sophia Acuña, Christian Fobian, Patricio Hernández Palazuelos and Krista Winther. In cooperation between these two arts institutions, the four Word for Word Exchange Writers have been engaged in a collaborative project of mutual translation. Moderated by Katrine Øgaard Jensen, they will present excerpts from the resulting work here in a multilingual reading and discussion about international 21st-century art-making with writers on the faculty of both institutions. In-person. Hosted by Scandinavia House. More info here. Starts at 7:00 p.m. (ET)
Saturday, September 20:
Transletting Reading at Molasses Books | This creative translation reading will include a visiting group of students from the German Literature Institute in Leipzig who will be reading in collaboration with their partners from New York. Each group sent each other work to creatively translate and now they will be presenting their intertwined readings at Molasses Books. In-person. Hosted by Molasses Books. Starts at 8:00 p.m. (ET)
Sunday, September 21:
Myth, Folklore, and Everyday Horror | Authors Amanda Lee Koe (Sister Snake), Zuzana Říhová (Playing Wolf, translated by Alex Zucker), and Olive Senior (Paradise Once) share the ways Chinese, Czech, and Jamaican myth and folklore have influenced their work. Moderated by Elina Alter. Made possible with the support of the Czech Literary Centre. In-person. More info here. Hosted by the Brooklyn Book Festival. Starts at 2:00 p.m. (ET)
Monday, September 22:
Book launch: Playing Wolf | Join us for the launch of the English-language edition of Zuzana Říhová’s acclaimed novel Cestou špendlíků nebo jehel (Argo, 2021), translated by Alex Zucker as Playing Wolf (Catapult, 2025). Following her appearance at this year’s Brooklyn Book Festival on September 21, Říhová will join Zucker for an intimate conversation about this disturbingly elegant psychological horror story, the folklore that inspired it, and the process of bringing it into English. In-person. More info here. Hosted by the Brooklyn Book Festival. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. Starts at 7:00 p.m. (ET)
Wednesday, September 24:
In Translation: Thomas Schlesser on Mona’s Eyes with Idra Novey | Join us for an evening with French art historian and debut novelist Thomas Schlesser, celebrating the release of his internationally bestselling novel Mona’s Eyes. Schlesser will be joined in conversation by Idra Novey, acclaimed author of Take What You Need and co-translator of Lean Against This Late Hour by Iranian poet Garous Abdolmalekian, a 2021 finalist for the PEN America Poetry in Translation Prize. A book signing will follow. In-person. Hosted by the Center for Fiction. More info here. 7:00 p.m. - 8:15 p.m. (ET)
Thursday, September 25:
The Transletting Walk | New York City is the most polyglot city in the world — more than 800 languages are spoken here. With the Transletting Walk, we celebrate this richness and explore what happens when translation leaves the page and enters the street. The walk begins at 3:30pm at Literary Walk in Central Park (meet by the Shakespeare statue) and moves through Central Park and Riverside Park: readers read aloud in many languages — often at the same time – and participants are invited to join in. Translation can happen across or within languages. You can read along, translate, or simply listen and drift alongside. Feel free to bring your own texts — the walk is porous by design. At 6:00pm the event continues at Columbia University's Casa Hispánica (612 W. 116th Street, New York, NY 10027) with a mix of short prepared pieces, collective translation prompts, and an open stage where results from the walk (or other texts participants bring) can be shared. In-person. Hosted by the Goethe Institute. More info here. 3:30 p.m. - 6:00 p.m. (ET)
Frail Riffs / Frêle bruit: Michel Leiris in Translation | Eight years ago, the Maison Française hosted a remarkable conversation on the art of translation and the work of French writer, ethnographer, and pioneer of modern confessional literature Michel Leiris, to coincide with the release of Lydia Davis's translation of Fibrils (2017), the third volume in Leiris's great autobiographical cycle, Rules of the Game. Now, as the fourth and final volume of that cycle, Frail Riffs (2024), is published in Richard Sieburth's translation, the Maison reconvenes many of the same participants for an extraordinary panel of distinguished writers, translators and scholars, all of whom have translated or edited Leiris's works: Lydia Davis, Brent Hayes Edwards, Denis Hollier, and Richard Sieburth. In-person. Hosted by La Maison Française of NYU. More info here and here. 5:00 p.m. - 7:00 p.m. (ET)
C.F. Ramuz's Into the Sun, presented by translators Olivia Baes & Emma Ramadan | Co-translators Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan present their translation from French of Charles Ferdinand Ramuz's Into the Sun, in conversation with Geoffrey O'Brien, editor-in-chief of Library of America. The novel details the Earth’s slow, cruel end as it tilts towards the sun and becomes far too hot for living beings. Society collapses, people turn on each other or finally embrace themselves, throng together in the only remaining body of water to escape the scorching sand, ambush each other for access to higher ground, delude themselves into keeping up with routine, think only of money or only of God, succumb to the ultimate power of nature over mankind and sweetly say goodbye to the landscapes they loved. In-person. Hosted by McNally Jackson Seaport. More info here. Starts at 7:00 p.m. (ET)
Monday, September 29:
Colloquy: Emily Wilson & Luke Soucy on Translating the Epic | BPL Presents welcomes World Poetry Books for the latest installment of Colloquy: Translators in Conversation, featuring a discussion on "Translating the Epic," with readings and discussion from Emily Wilson and Luke Soucy, moderated by Colloquy curator C. Francis Fisher. Wilson will read from her translations of the Homeric epics and Soucy will read from his translation of Ovid's Metamorphosis, followed by a conversation. The conversation will explore the way in which translators make ancient texts legible for contemporary audiences, how formal choices such as writing in iambic pentameter constrain or clarify the meaning of the original, and the political dimensions of retranslating canonical works. In-person. Hosted by the Brooklyn Public Library. More info here. 7:00 p.m. - 8:30 p.m. (ET)
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