The PEN Ten is PEN America’s biweekly interview series curated by Lauren Cerand. This week Lauren talks to Karen Emmerich, a translator of Greek poetry and prose, and an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Oregon. Her recent and forthcoming books include poetry by Miltos Sachtouris, Yannis Ritsos, and Eleni Vakalo, and fiction by Sophia Nikolaidou, Amanda Michalopoulou, Ersi Sotiropoulos, Margarita Karapanou, and Vassilis Vassilikos. She is the recipient of translation grants and honors from PEN, the NEA, and the Modern Greek Studies Association; her translation of Sachtouris’s POEMS (1945-1971) was a finalist for a National Book Critics’ Circle Award in 2006.
When did being a translator begin to inform your sense of purpose?
I somehow find it much easier to switch those terms, and to say that a sense of purpose has always informed my translating, from the very first book I translated, Margarita Karapanou’s novel Rien ne va plus. It was actually the first book I ever read in Greek, when I was eighteen, and it gutted me. Of all the books I’ve translated, it’s the one I’ve gotten the most emails from strangers about. Knowing that her work now affects people in English as it did me in Greek—that provides an incredible sense of purpose. And of course now that Greece is constantly in the news, portrayed in frustratingly distorted and unfair ways, I feel an increased sense of obligation to keep bringing across as much Greek literature as I can, to counter these media representations and misrepresentations.
Whose work would you like to steal without attribution or consequences?
Well, as a translator, I’m always “stealing,” in a sense, and yet acutely aware of the ethical implications of what I do. I’m also a professor, which makes me sort of a stickler for proper citation.
To Koskino 