Susan Bernofsky

Associate Professor of Writing, Columbia University

Ellen Maria Gorrissen Fellow - Class of Fall 2020

Susan Bernofsky directs the translation program at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. She completed her BA at Johns Hopkins University, MFA in fiction at Washington University in St. Louis, and PhD in comparative literature at Princeton University. Bernofsky has taught at Bard College, Sarah Lawrence College, and Queens College. Her translations include eight works by the Swiss-German modernist Robert Walser, whose forthcoming biography she is publishing with Yale. A Guggenheim fellow and former chair of the PEN Translation Committee, Bernofsky co-edited (with Esther Allen) the anthology In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means (Columbia 2013). Bernofsky has also translated novels and poetry by Jenny Erpenbeck, Yoko Tawada, Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse, Uljana Wolf, and others. Her translation of Erpenbeck’s novel The End of Days won several awards, including the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Her translation of Tawada’s 2016 novel Memoirs of a Polar Bear received the inaugural Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. Her additional awards include the 2019 Lois Roth Award, Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize, and Hermann Hesse Translation Prize.

Project Description

Translation of "The Magic Mountain" by Thomas Mann

At the Academy, Bernofsky will continue her translation of what she describes as “arguably the most essential work in the canon of modernist anxiety,” Thomas Mann’s 1924 “The Magic Mountain”. The protagonist, an ostensibly healthy man, stops by a tuberculosis sanatorium to pay a visit and is unable to leave, stricken with the disease. Mann sets his story in the years before World War I, “with the rumblings of militarism around the edges of the novel,” she writes, “a correlative to the traitorous capitulation of the main character’s own lymphocytes.” Bernofsky plans to research Mann’s life and circumstances as well as Europe’s spa and sanatorium culture, the politics of the pre-war period, Swiss isolationism before and during the war, and the philosophical debates that inspired the novel’s characters Settembrini and Naphta. “My goal is to be able to imagine the novel’s setting as Mann saw it and communicate this vision to the reader in my translation of his words,” she writes. “The point isn’t to create a fake old text, but rather to have the translation gesture to the age of the original, giving a stronger sense of the book’s chronological as well as stylistic rooting while avoiding anachronisms.”

Academy Activities

29 Oct 20
Translation as Storytelling Literature

ONLINE: Ellen Maria Gorrissen Lecture

Translation as Storytelling

Susan Bernofsky discusses her approach to the translation of several masterpieces from the German canon.

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13 Nov 20

The Importance of Being Thomas Mann

There are few novelists who made more of an impact on twentieth-century German literature than Thomas Mann. His works have been translated into over thirty languages and remain the subject of much debate. On today’s podcast, we bring together two scholars who have made Mann’s life and l ...

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29 Oct 20

Translation as Storytelling

Translating is always a kind of storytelling, says Susan Bernofsky, a way of giving an account of a reading of a work. When re-translating classic literature, the translator’s own story becomes an additional factor in the interpretation of the work. In this talk, Bernofsky discusses her approach t ...

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