Department of Modern Languages and Comparative Literature

 

Esther Allen's publications include To Be Translated or Not To Be (Institut Ramon Llull, 2007), a collection of articles about translation and globalization to which she contributed the lead essay on English and globalization; As You Were Saying: American Writers Respond to Their French Contemporaries (Dalkey Archive Press, 2007), co-edited with Fabrice Rozie and Guy Walter, a widely-reviewed collection of texts that were initiated by French writers, translated into English, then completed by American writers. Her most recent translations include Antonio Muñoz Molina’s In Her Absence (Other Press, 2007) named one of the best books of 2007 by the Washington Post Book World; and Rex, by José Manuel Prieto (Grove Press), a runner-up for the  2010 PEN Translation Award.

In Translation: Translators on their Work and What It Means, an anthology of essays by literary translators about their work, co-edited with Susan Bernofsky, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press in 2013; its publication and an accompanying symposium have been supported by a grant from Amazon.com. Also forthcoming in 2013 is Allen's translation of José Manuel Prieto's Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia.

Additional publications include a translation of Alma Guillermoprieto’s Dancing with Cuba, named one of the 25 “Memorable Books of 2004” by the New York Public Library,  and José Marti: Selected Writings, which she edited, annotated and translated, and which  was named one of the notable books of  2002 by the Los Angeles Times Book Review. The Selected Non-fiction of Jorge Luis Borges, edited by Eliot Weinberger, which she co-translated with Weinberger and Suzanne Jill Levine, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism in 1999.

Allen directed the work of the PEN Translation Fund from 2003-2010, and in 2004 she co-founded PEN World Voices: the New York Festival of International Literature. In 2006, the French government named her a Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des letters in recognition of her work to promote a culture of translation in the United States.

In addition to teaching at Baruch, she has taught at NYU, New School University, Temple University, Seton Hall University, Columbia University and Princeton University. She was the recipient of a Fulbright Grant for dissertation research in Mexico in 1989, and has been awarded two National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowships, the first, in 1995, for the translation of Rosario Castellanos’s  1962 novel Oficio de Tinieblas, published in English by Penguin Classics as The Book of Lamentations, and the second, in 2010, for the translation of the 1956 Argentine classic novel Zama, by Antonio Di Benedetto. In 2009-2010, she was a Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. In 2012, she received the Feliks Gross Endowment Award from City University of New York.

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