translators from the Japanese

Ted Goossen & Michael Emmerich

a reading & discussion

Monday, March 19, 7 PM

McNally Jackson Books

52 Prince Street (between Lafayette & Mulberry

New York, NY 10012 (212-274-1160) 

Theodore (Ted) Goossen is Professor of Humanities at York University in Toronto, and a founding member of the Department of Contemporary Literary Studies at the University of Tokyo. He has written extensively on Japanese literature and film, and has published translations by numerous authors including Hiromi Kawakami, Yoko Ogawa, Masuji Ibuse, Naoya Shiga, Yukio Mishima, and Haruki Murakami. He is editor of The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories and is presently co-editor, with Motoyuki Shibata, of Monkey Business International, the first Japanese literary magazine to be made available in an English version.

→More information about Monkey Business

Michael Emmerich’s translations include a number of novels by Banana Yoshimoto (The Lake, Hardboiled & Hard Luck, Moonlight Shadow, Goodbye Tsugumi and Asleep), Manazuru (Counterpoint, 2010) by Hiromi Kawakami, The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P (Kodansha, 2009) by Rieko Matsuura, Vibrator (Soft Skull, 2007) by Mari Akasaka, Sayonara, Gangsters (Vertical Inc., 2004) by Genichiro Takahashi, and First Snow on Fuji (Counterpoint, 1999) by Yasunari Kawabata. He has edited and translated collections of contemporary Japanese short stories, including Short Stories in Japanese (Penguin, 2011) and Read Real Japanese Fiction (Kodansha, 2008). Among many other activities, he has contributed articles and translations to Words Without Borders and Monkey Business, and in 2011 he ran a Japanese-to-English workshop at the British Centre for Literary Translation. Honors he has received include a Fulbright Scholarship, an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship, and the 2010 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for a Translation of Japanese Literature, for Manazuru. He is currently assistant professor of Premodern Japanese Literature and Cultural Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara, where his research is focused on translations of The Tale of Genji.

→Read the Quarterly Conversation interview with Michael Emmerich