Paraphrasis

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?

Dec 15, 2025 • Camellia Pham

7:34

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…

Dec 1, 2025 • Camellia Pham

24:47

November 2025

Bonus: Annabel Kim on “What if”

What do we do with a word that means both “if” and “yes”?

Nov 17, 2025 • Camellia Pham

3:51

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…

Nov 3, 2025 • Camellia Pham

16:52

October 2025

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?

Oct 20, 2025 • Camellia Pham

4:20

Spencer Lee-Lenfield on Biologicity

Spencer Lee-Lenfield brings us Biologicity (Black Ocean, 2024) by South Korean poet Shin Hae-uk, a collection with offbeat turns, twisted logic, and…

Oct 6, 2025 • Camellia Pham

20:30

September 2025

Bonus: Mark Harman on retitling Kafka

What happens when a title becomes too familiar?

Sep 15, 2025 • Camellia Pham

1

4:27

Mark Harman on Franz Kafka’s Selected Stories

Mark Harman returns to Kafka with Selected Stories (Harvard University Press, 2024), a collection that combines courtroom logic with surrealist…

Sep 2, 2025 • Camellia Pham

17:33

August 2025

Special Episode 3: The Doctoral Program

During the 2024-25 academic year, the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard celebrated its departmental anniversary—and Paraphrasis is…

Aug 28, 2025 • Camellia Pham

32:33

Bonus: Adam Mahler on the poet’s names

What’s in a name?

Aug 18, 2025 • Camellia Pham

3:44

Adam Mahler on Shem Tov Ardutiel’s Moral Proverbs and Other Old Castilian Poems of Jewish Authorship

In this episode, Adam Mahler discusses his translation of Shem Tov Ardutiel’s Moral Proverbs and Other Old Castilian Poems of Jewish Authorship…

Aug 4, 2025 • Anna Hennigan

17:07

July 2025

Special Episode 2: The Undergraduate Program

During the 2024-25 academic year, the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard celebrated its departmental anniversary—and Paraphrasis is…

Jul 29, 2025 • Jess Jensen Mitchell

30:02