Outdated Browser

For the best experience using our website, we recommend upgrading your browser to a newer version or switching to a supported browser.

More Information

Contributor

Esther Allen

Contributor

Esther Allen

Esther Allen's translations include the Penguin Classics anthology José Martí: Selected Writings, Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia by José Manuel Prieto, Lands of Memory by Felisberto Hernández, Alma Guillermoprieto's Dancing with Cuba: A Memoir of the Revolution, andZama by Antonio Di Benedetto, which is forthcoming in August, 2016. With Susan Bernofsky, she edited In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means. She edited and wrote for To Be Translated or Not To Be (Institut Ramon Llull, 2007), the PEN International report on translation and globalization. A former fellow at the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and at the Leon Levy Center for Biography, she was named a Chevalier de l'ordre des arts et des lettres by the French government for her work promoting a culture of translation in English. She teaches at the Graduate Center and Baruch College, City University of New York. Her Web site is estherallen.com.

Articles by Esther Allen

Edith Piaf (left) and David Bowie (right) at the microphone

Édith Piaf and David Bowie, Wikimedia Commons.

From the Translator: The Song Remains the Same?

By Esther Allen

Images: David Bowie, 1974; Silvia Pérez Cruz, 2008; Édith Piaf, 1962 (Wikimedia Commons). Esther Allen’s translation of Erick J. Mota’s “The Bleeding Hands of Castaways” appears…

On Cuban Time

By Esther Allen & Hillary Gulley

Cuban time moves to its own complex rhythms.

Project DreamReal

By Herson Tissert Pérez

“you can't go asking for the impossible.”

Translated from Spanish by Esther Allen

MultimediaMultilingual

The Bleeding Hands of Castaways

By Erick J. Mota

But you’re a space man, and you needed to build me a bar on an asteroid.

Translated from Spanish by Esther Allen

MultimediaMultilingual

The New Normal: On Cuba and the Power of Translation

By Esther Allen

During the historic speech on December 17, 2014, when he announced the normalization of relations with Cuba, Barack Obama turned to address the Cuban people directly. He began with a citation from José…

A Voice in the Crowd: A Sketch

By Antonio Muñoz Molina

Ignacio Abel stopped in his tracks when, through the hubbub of Penn Station, he heard someone calling his name. Which, of course, was impossible. In his three days of waiting in New York, he’d received…

Translated from Spanish by Esther Allen

from As You Were Saying

By Marie Darrieussecq & Rick Moody

The collection As You Were Saying: American Writers Respond to Their French Counterparts presents stories begun by French writers and then responded to by their American opposite numbers. Here Marie Darrieussecq…

Translated from French by Esther Allen

from “REX”

By José Manuel Prieto

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: Jose Manuel Prieto’s Rex is a novel like none other. Its epigraph, from Bishop Berkeley, “Things are what they appear to be,” is the first of many indications…

Translated from Spanish by Esther Allen

You’ve Never Seen Red Like This Before

By José Manuel Prieto

IAt ten o’clock on a fine sunny morning I went out for a stroll and, as luck would have it, ran into Marina in front of the big department stores in the city center. My friend was wearing a magnificent…

Translated from Spanish by Esther Allen

Doors, Windows, and the Office of Foreign Assets Control

By Esther Allen

Lex and I came to the strange realization that we, and Alejo Carpentier, had effectively been censored by the United States government.

[class^="wpforms-"]

[class^="wpforms-"]