December 2025: Alumni Publications

Ryan Hintzman (YC ’17/GS ’25) recently took up a new position as Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Indiana University-Bloomington, where he teaches courses on premodern Japanese literature, comparative poetics, and literary translation. He is currently working on two translation projects. The first is a set of hundred-poem votive waka sequences offered to shrines in the wake of social, political, or personal upheaval. Preliminary work on this material, which is the focus of his first scholarly monograph, was supported by YTI summer grants. The second project is translation of and commentary on an imaginary poem gathering (utaawase)—one dreamt up by a former emperor living in exile on a remote island—that features a hundred exemplary poets from different eras of Japanese history. 

Quentin Veron (YC ’25) began the MFA program in translation at the University of Iowa in September. He received Yale College’s Maxwell Prize in Translation and the Yale College Field prize for his senior thesis, a translation from Romain Gary’s Gros Câlin, which has also received a 2026 PEN/Heim Translation Grant.

Spencer Lee Lenfield (GS, PhD in Comp Lit, ’24) recently took up a position as Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard, where he will be focusing on translation studies and literary translation, especially in Asian American Literature and Korean Literature. Spencer recently published Shin Hae-uk’s  Biologicity (Black Ocean, 2024) and is currently working on her latest collection, Natural History from Nature’s Edge, among other projects. His translations of poetry and fiction have appeared in literary journals including Kenyon Review, Guernica, Poetry Northwest, New England Review, Colorado Review, The Margins, and Asymptote. 

Sophie Duvernoy (GS, PhD in German, ’23) has just published Effingers, by the German novelist Gabriel Tergit (New York Review Books and Pushkin Press). A multigenerational family saga about German Jewish life in Berlin, the book—which was only recently re-discovered in Germany— is a meditation on identity and nationality that, as the publisher’s note has it, establishes Tergit as one of the most significant writers of the twentieth century. Her first book, a translation of Käsebier Takes Berlin (NYRB/Pushkin Press), was shortlisted for the 2021 Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize awarded by the Society of Authors (UK). Sophie was a 2023-2024 Translation Fellow of the National Endowment of the Arts (US).

Elizabeth Raab (YC ’23/currently at Yale Law) won the annual Gutekunst Prize of the Friends of Goethe New York for her translation of an excerpt from Julia Schoch’s Das Liebespaar desJahrhunderts (dtv, 2023).

Daniel Yadin (YC ’21) is an associate poetry editor at Asymptote, a journal of world literature in translation. He reports on translation news and other parts of the small-press ecosystem for Publishers Weekly and writes essays on, and reviews of, literature in translation for the outlets mentioned above, Full Stop, and more. He runs a poetry reading series on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and is at work on translations from the Hebrew of Tuvia Ruebner and from the Spanish of Nuria Manzur Bernabéu. 

Marlon (Mars) Grabar Sage (YC ’19) graduated from the University of Iowa’s MFA program in Translation last spring. Their thesis was on Violette Leduc’s Ravages. 

Alice Yang (YC ’19/currently in the PhD program in French) published Abounding Freedom by Julien Gracq, with World Poetry Books in May 2024, about which translator Richard Sieburth said: “Alice Yang has beautifully registered the groove and gyre of Gracq’s prose poetry as nobody before.” Her work has appeared in a variety of journals, including AGNI, the Yale Review, Two Lines, and Asymptote and she recently read at the Us & Them reading series in Brooklyn. Her current work on Adèle Yon’s debut novel, Mon vrai nom est Élisabeth (My Real Name Is Elisabeth), for Fitzcarraldo Editions and FSG, was recently announced in a feature article in The Bookseller.

Rachel Kaufman (YC ’19) has co-authored, with Dr. Gabriela Villanueva (UNAM), a children's book adaptation of La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream) by Pedro Calderón de la Barca (forthcoming from Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León). Her UCLA Working Group on the Comedia in Translation and Performance just released a new comedia: The Beast of Hungary: A comedy by Lope de Vega, and Rachel’s article on Chicanx and crypto-Jewish poetics and translating history/identity recently appeared in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies: “Forging New Histories through Poetry: Disembodiment, Multiplicity, and Nostalgia in Chicana and Crypto-Jewish Poetics.”

Jacob Romm (YC’18/currently a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Yale) translates poetry from French, Yiddish, and Hebrew. Most recently, he has been working on translations of the Yiddish poet Menke Katz with the support of the Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellowship. Jacob’s translations have been published in Asymptote, Circumference, ANMLY,  Inventory, and Ancient Exchanges. In addition to his work in translation, Jacob makes letterpress prints under the imprint Letter and Spirit Press, and is the Managing Editor of Chrysalis Magazine, which publishes art and writing by trans youth. 

Adam Mahler (YC ’17) is currently completing his dissertation on the medieval Iberian lyric at Harvard University. In 2025, he was appointed Corresponding Member of the Institute of Medieval Studies at NOVA University Lisbon. His translation of Shem Tov Ardutiel’s Moral Proverbs and Other Old Castilian Poems of Jewish Authorship is forthcoming in the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library at Harvard University Press. He has taught Ladino at Harvard and UC Berkeley, and currently heads online instruction in Judeo-Spanish literature as a Lecturer at Berkeley’s Center for Jewish Studies.

Gwendolyn Harper (YC ’15) won the National Book Critics Circle Award for her translations of Pedro Lemebel’s Last Supper of Queer Apostles (Penguin, 2024). Her translation was also longlisted for the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute Translation Prize. She speaks about her work in several recent interviews, including the Contemporary Translated Works Book Group series sponsored by the Mechanics' Institute, in partnership with Center for the Art of Translation and Folio: The Seattle Athenaeum, and her NBCC conversation with Mandana Chaffa. She was recently a writer in residence at the Jan Michalski Foundation, in Switzerland.

Austin Carder (YC’15) recently published a translation of Cavalier Perspective: Last Essays, 1952-1966, by André Breton (City Lights Press, 2025), about which Cole Swenson wrote: “Austin Carder has performed a monster feat of translation here, catching every nuance of Breton's sinuous, faceted thinking.” The book is Carder’s second, and follows on the heels of Poetries, by Georges Schehadé (Song Cave, 2021). Austin continues to edit Caesura magazine.

Eli Mandel (YC ’14) published his first book of poetry, which is deeply rooted in his study of translation and his work as a translator. The Grid (Carcanet/Changes, 2023), was longlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize 2025 and shortlisted for the Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award 2024 and the John Pollard Poetry Prize 2024, and cited as a Book of the Year by The Telegraph Book of the Year. His work has appeared in The Yale Review, History of the Present, The Winter Review, Raritan Quarterly, The Harvard Review, Ploughshares Solos, The New Inquiry, PN Review, and elsewhere. Eli is currently teaching in the English and Comparative Literature Departments at Columbia.

Eric Fishman (YC ’14) published Outside: Poetry and Prose by André du Bouchet with Bitter Oleander Press! This bilingual collection (co-translated with Hoyt Rogers) brings together a cross-section of verse from over five decades du Bouchet’s work, including a selection of his legendary notebook fragments. His translations have appeared in AGNI, The Cortland Review, Exchanges, and elsewhere. He is currently translating a collection of poetry by the Martinican writer Monchoachi, supported by a grant from the government of Martinique. Samples of this project are available on Asymptote, Poetry Daily, Two Lines, AGNI, and Arc Poetry. Other Monchoachi translations of his have appeared in Violent Phenomena: 21 Essays on Translation (Tilted Axis), and in the collection Visible: Text + Image (Two Lines).

Laura Marris (YC ’10,) MFA Boston University, teaches creative writing at the University of Buffalo. Her books of translation from the French include The Plague by Albert Camus (2022), the first new translation of Camus’ novel in 70 years.

Sebastián Andrés Grandas (PhD student in Comparative Literature) has three translated stories from Sergio Ramírez’s De Tropeles y Tropelías (1972) forthcoming in the November issue of the New England Review. Sebastián was supported by the Yale Translation Initiative to work on the translations this past summer and to meet with Ramírez in Madrid, where the author is currently living in exile. The three stories were also previously workshopped with JoLT and read as part of Hannan Hever’s seminar on Marxist Literary Theory. Sebastián is currently finishing a translation of the collection as a whole.