Professor Susan Bernofsky Awarded Honorary Professorship at Freie Universität Berlin
Writing Professor and Director of Literary Translation Susan Bernofsky has been awarded an honorary professorship at the Freie Universität Berlin for Summer 2023.
The August Wilhelm von Schlegel Honorary Professorship in the Poetics of Translation is sponsored by Deutscher Übersetzerfonds (German Translators’ Fund), a funding and advocacy organization that supports literary translation work through grants, publications, workshops, and public events. This professorship is the first of its kind in the German-speaking world devoted to the art of translation, and Bernofsky is the first translator from German to English, rather than into German, to hold this professorship.
The University, via press release, said, “The very name of the “Poetics of Translation” professorship speaks to its ambitious scope and aspirations. Since its establishment, the professorship has opened up a space and platform for reflection on historical methods and theories of literary translation, as well as the relevance of translation to literature and cultural history.”
"I’m thrilled to be returning to Berlin, a site of great literary discovery for me in the 90s, and to have the opportunity to teach translation in one of the finest academic programs in Europe,” Bernofsky said. “August Wilhelm Schlegel was a great inspiration for me as a translator—and one of the subjects of my dissertation—and it’s such an honor to be invited to hold the professorship named for him.”
A 2020 Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, 2019 fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and past Guggenheim fellow, Bernofsky has translated more than twenty books including three novels and four collections of short prose by the great Swiss-German modernist author Robert Walser, as well as Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha. She is the author, most recently, of Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser (Yale, 2021), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. Past awards include the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize and the Hermann Hesse Translation Prize. Her translation of Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel The End of Days (2014) won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, The Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize, the Ungar Award for Literary Translation, and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Her translation of Yoko Tawada’s novel Memoirs of a Polar Bear (2016) won the inaugural Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. In 2019 she received the Modern Language Association’s Lois Roth Award and the Friedrich Ulfers Prize. Her translation of Yoko Tawada’s novel Paul Celan and the Transtibetan Angel is forthcoming in 2023 from New Directions. She is currently working on a new translation of Thomas Mann’s monumental novel The Magic Mountain for W.W. Norton.