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Contributor

Esther Allen

Contributor

Esther Allen

Esther Allen’s translations include the Penguin Classics anthology José Martí: Selected WritingsSlander by Linda Lê, Lands of Memory by Felisberto Hernández, Alma Guillermoprieto’s Dancing with Cuba: A Memoir of the Revolution, and Zama by Antonio Di Benedetto, winner of the 2017 National Translation Award for Prose. With Susan Bernofsky, she edited In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means. She also edited 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 City University of New York Graduate Center and at Baruch College, CUNY, where she runs the Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence Program. Her website is estherallen.com.

Articles by Esther Allen

Esther Allen stands at a podium reading her laudatory remarks
Esther Allen makes laudatory remarks at the 2023 Ottaway Award ceremony honoring Daniel Hahn
The Multitudinous Daniel Hahn: A Laudation
By Esther Allen
He sees an opportunity, creates a network of support for it, and makes something transformative happen.
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.
Translated from Spanish by Esther Allen
From “As You Were Saying”
By Marie Darrieussecq & Rick Moody
The tracheotomy left him hoarse for a long time but in the end he got his normal voice back.
Translated from French by Esther Allen
From “REX”
By José Manuel Prieto
To turn the stone over in the palm of my hand, scrutinize it more closely, a real stone, a diamond in the rough?
Translated from Spanish by Esther Allen
You’ve Never Seen Red Like This Before
By José Manuel Prieto
Perhaps this is the best moment to dispel any doubts the reader may have with regard to my intellectual seriousness and capacity (I doubt the list of authors included above had much effect).
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.