Susan Bernofsky
A much-lauded translator of modernist and contemporary German-language literature, Bernofsky holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from Washington University and a PhD in Comparative Literature from Princeton University. Her many translations include 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. She is a Berlin Prize, Cullman Center, and Guggenheim fellow. Past awards include the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize, the Modern Language Association’s Lois Roth Award, 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. Her most recent published translation is Tawada’s novel Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel (2024). She has recently completed a new translation of Thomas Mann’s monumental novel The Magic Mountain, forthcoming from W.W. Norton in early 2027.
The National Book Critics Circle recently announced a list of 30 finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Awards.
After translating the works of Swiss-German author Robert Walser for decades, Professor Susan Bernofsky has written the first English-language biography of him.
Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser by Associate Professor and LTAC Director Susan Bernofsky will be released on May 25, 2021 by Yale University Press.
Here, we talk with Associate Professor of Writing and Director of Literary Translation at Columbia (LTAC) Susan Bernofsky about her translation of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, how a single word can illuminate important artistic tendencies, and her approaches to teaching translation.
Associate Professor Susan Bernofsky and alumna Alexandra Kleeman ’12 are two of this year’s recipients of the Berlin Prize, awarded by the American Academy in Berlin.
Writers in Collaboration is a series covering writers involved in two art mediums and/or working with other artists.
Associate Professor and Head of the Translation Program, Susan Bernofsky was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize for her translation of Jenny Erpenbeck's novel, Go, Went, Gone.
Associate Professor and Director of the Translation program Susan Bernofsky took part in the 2020 Translating the Future conference last week, which was co-sponsored by the PEN Translation Committee, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center. Bernofsky is an award-winning literary translator, and she has translated the works of Robert Walser, Jenny Erpenbeck, Yoko Tawada, Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse, Uljana Wolf, and others.
It seems that to know Robert Walser is to love him. The great Swiss-German writer who lived, struggled, and worked prolifically in the early 20th century, a contemporary of Kafka and Herman Hesse, has been easily overlooked in the decades since his death, but for a robust and still growing following of Walser enthusiasts.
Writing Professor and Director of Literary Translation Susan Bernofsky has been awarded an honorary professorship at the Freie Universität Berlin for Summer 2023.
An English translation by Professor Susan Bernofsky of Yoko Tawada’s German novel, Paul Celan And The Trans-Tibetan Angel, will be published by New Directions in July 2024.