Collaborative Translation of Girls and Institutions by Daria Serenko

Bonus: On calendars and untranslatable wallpaper

What does a translator do when one Russian word summons an entire visual world while English barely has a name for it? Nadezhda, Sasha, and Philippa unpack the long Google Doc trail behind a tear-off calendar, a photo mural, and the quiet surrealism of office décor that says everything without saying much. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.paraphrasispodcast.com [https://www.paraphrasispodcast.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Collaborative Translation of Girls and Institutions by Daria Serenko

To close out Season 2, we spoke with three translators—Sasha Karsavina, Philippa Mullins, and Nadezhda Vikulina—about their collaborative translation of Girls and Institutions (excerpt in n+1 [https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-48/fiction-drama/girls-and-institutions/], 2024), Russian writer and activist Daria Serenko’s polyphonic portrait of girls under late-state bureaucracy. From tangled pronouns to shifting registers, the trio walks us through their methods of translating a text where everyday office work gives way to flashes of levity and transcendence. Somewhere between the poetic and the prosaic, every sentence becomes a site of collective negotiation and female solidarity. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.paraphrasispodcast.com [https://www.paraphrasispodcast.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Bonus: Annabel Kim on “What if”

What do we do with a word that means both “if” and “yes”? Annabel shares the experience of grappling with the ending poem of Plasmas, where conditional grammar runs up against an imaginative imperative. Annabel ultimately lands on a solution that preserves the tremble between if and yes. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.paraphrasispodcast.com [https://www.paraphrasispodcast.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Annabel Kim on Plasmas

Annabel Kim joins us to talk about Plasmas (Deep Vellum, 2022), Céline Minard’s posthuman sci-fi series of vignettes that read like a syntactical tornado. As Annabel unpacks Minard’s invented jargons and depictions of estranged humanity, we follow a translation journey shaped by ecological grief, disorienting prose, and the polysemous charge of language that refuses clarity. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.paraphrasispodcast.com [https://www.paraphrasispodcast.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Bonus: Spencer Lee-Lenfield on translating rhyme across languages

What happens when you translate from a poetic tradition that sidesteps rhyme into one that can’t help but hum in iambic pentameter? Spencer weighs the trade-offs of bringing Korean free verse into rhyme-chasing English, and why the occasional slant rhyme might be a translator’s best currency. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.paraphrasispodcast.com [https://www.paraphrasispodcast.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]