Department of Modern Languages and Comparative Literature

Esther Allen came to Baruch in the fall of 2007. Her publications since then include: To Be Translated or Not To Be (Institut Ramon Llull, 2007), a collection of articles about translation and globalization which was widely distributed at the 2007 Frankfurt Book Fair, and to which she contributed the lead essay, on English and globalization; As You Were Saying: American Writers Respond to Their French Contemporaries (Dalkey Archive Press, 2007), co-edited with Fabrice Rozie and Guy Walter, a widely-reviewed collection of texts that were initiated by French writers, translated into English, then completed by American writers; and Antonio Muñoz Molina’s In Her Absence (Other Press, 2007) which she translated into English, and which was named one of the best books of 2007 by the Washington Post Book World.

In 2006, she was named a Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des letters in recognition of her work to promote a culture of translation in the United States. She has directed the work of the PEN Translation Fund since it was founded in 2003, and has been Executive Director of the Center for Literary Translation at Columbia University since it was founded in 2005 (see: www.centerforliterarytranslation.org). In 2004, with Salman Rushdie and Michael Roberts, she co-founded PEN World Voices: the New York Festival of International Literature, which inaugurated a tradition of collaboration with Baruch’s Great Works program last year.

Additional publications include a translation of Alma Guillermoprieto’s Dancing with Cuba which was named one of the 25 “Memorable Books of 2004” by the New York Public Library. José Marti:Selected Writings, which she edited, annotated and translated, was named one of the notable books of  2002 by the Los Angeles Times Book Review. The Selected Non-fiction of Jorge Luis Borges, edited by Eliot Weinberger, which she co-translated with Weinberger and Suzanne Jill Levine, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism in 1999.

Her academic areas of expertise include the history and theory of literary translation, 19th- and 20th-century Latin American literature, and 19th- and 20th-century French literature. In addition to teaching at Baruch, she has taught at NYU, New School University, Temple University, Seton Hall University, Columbia University and Princeton University. She was the recipient of a Fulbright Grant for dissertation research in Mexico in 1989, and a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship for the translation of Rosario Castellanos’s novel The Book of Lamentations in 1995.

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