Paraphrasis is a podcast dedicated to the art and practice of literary translation, brought to you by a team of graduate students in the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard. In each episode, we welcome an established or emerging translator onto the show, asking them how they fell in love with their source text. This simple question leads to insightful, at times profound, conversations about moments of encounter, acts of interpretation, and perspectives on foreign literary traditions that lie behind the published translations we find on our bookshelves.
Read a little more about each episode below.
Spencer Lee-Lenfield brings us Biologicity (Black Ocean, 2024) by South Korean poet Shin Hae-uk, a collection with offbeat turns, twisted logic, and sudden switches in vocabulary. Spencer walks us through how to navigate deliberate fragmentation in the Korean word order, and the strange intimacy of rendering a poet who can comment on your translation in real time.
What happens when a title becomes too familiar? Mark Harman defends his decision to ditch “The Metamorphosis” for “The Transformation”—a shift that scraps the Latinate gloss, restores fidelity to Kafka’s voice, and moves against cultural habit.
Mark Harman returns to Kafka with Selected Stories (Harvard University Press, 2024), a collection that combines courtroom logic with surrealist punchlines. We discuss Kafka’s subtle irony, the mysteries tucked behind the lines, and the challenge of translating a voice that leaves the reader deliberately responsible for the text. As Mark delves into the subtle nuance and humor of Kafka’s Austrian-flavored German, he shows why Kafka is a one of those writers who we will never be finished translating.
During the 2024-25 academic year, the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard celebrated its departmental anniversary—and Paraphrasis is launching a series of summer special episodes to commemorate the occasion. In our last edition of the series, guest host Esther K. Heller sits down with two Harvard University in Comparative Literature alumni, Prof. Andrea Bachner who graduated in 2007 and Dr. Michael O’Krent who graduated this spring (2025). Together, they reflect on their experiences in the Comparative Literature department at Harvard, examine how the field has evolved, and explore what lies ahead for the next generation of comparatists.
What’s in a name? How do you translate a poet’s name that appears in multiple forms: sometimes in Hebrew as “the good name,” sometimes in various Spanish renderings, used by the poet himself for the sake of his rhyme scheme? In this bonus episode, Adam reflects on the quiet act of restituting “Shem Tov.” This isn’t a word puzzle, he tells us. It is a decision grounded in emotion.
In this episode, Adam Mahler discusses his translation of Shem Tov Ardutiel’s Moral Proverbs and Other Old Castilian Poems of Jewish Authorship (forthcoming from the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library at Harvard University Press). This collection captures the flourishing of Jewish poetry written in Old Spanish during the medieval period.
During the 2024-25 academic year, the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard celebrated its departmental anniversary—and Paraphrasis is launching a series of summer special episodes to commemorate the occasion. In the second edition of the series, guest host Jess Jensen Mitchell sits down with two alumnae of the college, Professors Moira Weigel of Harvard University, and Pelin Kivrak of Emerson College. Together, they reflect on their career trajectories after Harvard, their memories of undergraduate life, and their ongoing roles as educators and mentors.
What’s it like to tame an unruly stanza? And what happens when you’re tasked with translating an erratically rhymed Soviet-era poem, complete with dirt-caked children and a state-dispatched bath squad?
In this episode, Anna speaks with Miriam Udel about Honey on the Page (NYU Press), her 2021 anthology of Yiddish children’s literature from the 20th century. A project born of her roles as Yiddish scholar, teacher, and mother, the collection brings together folktales, fool stories, and bedtime parables for readers both steeped in Jewish culture and entirely new to it.
During the 2024-25 academic year, the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard celebrated its departmental anniversary—and Paraphrasis is launching a series of summer special episodes to commemorate the occasion. In our first edition of the series, guest host Lara Norgaard sits down with Spencer Lee-Lenfield and Sandra Naddaff, two members of the Comp Lit faculty who are also alumni of Harvard College.
What is a title? For Anton Hur, it’s “the most liberated thing” in a translator’s toolkit. Listen in on how Your Utopia got its name, as a blunt-sounding gerund in the English was traded in for something with sharper edges. Anton explains why the Korean title To Meet Her (Geunyeoreul Mannada), though thematically crucial, didn’t sit right on the tongue, and how his suggestion, “Your Utopia,” skewers the tech-bro fantasy of sleek, bloodless progress.
In this episode, translator and debut novelist Anton Hur discusses his English translation of Your Utopia (Algonquin Books, 2024), a fantastical and moving collection by South Korean author Bora Chung. From reordering stories to recharging sad robots, Anton shares his journey with Chung’s genre-bending work—and how a casual pitch at a book fair eventually led to Chung’s name on literary longlists.
Founded as a graduate program in 1904 and joining with the undergraduate Literature Concentration in 2007, Harvard’s Department of Comparative Literature operates at the crossroads of multilingualism, literary study, and media history.
© 2023 President and Fellows of Harvard College
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