Liesl Schillinger is a New York–based critic, translator, and moderator. She worked at The New Yorker for more than a decade and became a regular critic for The New York Times Book Review in 2004. Her articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Daily Beast, The New Yorker, Vogue, Foreign Policy, The New Republic, The Washington Post, and many other publications. She translates fiction and nonfiction from German, French, and Italian; recent novels translated include Every Day, Every Hour by Natasa Dragnic (Viking), and The Lady of the Camellias, by Alexandre Dumas, fils (Penguin Classics). She is the author of the book Wordbirds, an illustrated lexicon of necessary neologisms for the 21st Century (Simon & Schuster).
CONTRIBUTOR ARTICLES
Multilingual Wordsmiths, Part 6: Don Bartlett on Bringing Us Karl Ove Knausgaard
"You are originating when you translate; [...] you’re co-writing, you’re creating something in English from another language, it’s a creative act."...
Multilingual Wordsmiths, Part 5: Jamey Gambrell, In and Out of Russia
"By reading literature in translation, we become citizens of the world."...
Multilingual Wordsmiths, Part 4: Ann Goldstein on “Ferrante Fever”
"Pasolini is not known as an author as much as a moviemaker. I think his novels are really interesting. And I really like Romano Bilenchi."...
Multilingual Wordsmiths, Part 3: Edith Grossman on Reading Spanish and the Pitfalls of Literalism
"Translations aren’t made with tracing paper — two languages do not fit into the same space at the same time."...
Multilingual Wordsmiths, Part 2: Michael Hofmann in an Age of Increasing Insufficiency
Michael Hofmann and Liesl Schillinger discuss knowing German and translating the big story....
Multilingual Wordsmiths, Part 1: Lydia Davis and Translationese
I enjoy that aspect of writing that doesn’t involve writing one’s own things; I also love the puzzle aspect of it. Translation is writing and a puzzle....
BLARB BLOG POSTS
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Writing America: How the U.S. Was Recorded into Reality
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Getting Schooled: Bluto vs. Tracy Flick
