For Mary Ann Caws—noted translator of surrealist poetry—the most appealing translations are also the oddest; the unexpected, unpredictable, and unmimetic turns that translations take are an endless source of fascination and instruction. Surprised in Translation is a celebration of the occasional and fruitful peculiarity that results from some of the most flavorful translations of well-known authors. These translations, Caws avers, can energize and enliven the voice of the original.

In eight elegant chapters Caws reflects on translations that took her by surprise. Caws shows that the elimination of certain passages from the original—in the case of Stéphane Mallarmé translating Tennyson, Ezra Pound interpreting the troubadours, or Virginia Woolf rendered into French by Clara Malraux, Charles Mauron, and Marguerite Yourcenar—often produces a greater and more coherent art. Alternatively, some translations—such as Yves Bonnefoy’s translations of Shakespeare, Keats, and Yeats into French—require more lines in order to fully capture the many facets of the original. On other occasions, Caws argues, a swerve in meaning—as in Beckett translating himself into French or English—can produce a new text, just as true as the original. 

Imbued with Caws’s personal observations on the relationship between translators and the authors they translate, Surprised in Translation will interest a wide range of readers, including students of translation, professional literary translators, and scholars of modern and comparative literature.

From Southern roots to scholarly heights—one woman’s journey to find peace, purpose, and her place in the world.

A neat and lavish, if constricting, childhood in the lush landscapes of North Carolina. Summers at a calm, remote beach house. A proper and religiously influenced prep school in Washington. Years at Bryn Mawr, an impulsive study trip to Paris, further education at Yale, married life, and divorced life. These are the settings for Mary Ann Caws’s passionate memoir, in which she recounts the highs and lows of her journey through life. Marked by complicated relationships and a passion for learning, Caws’s story is one that resonates not only with writers like herself, but with all who have struggled with determining their path within the surrounding world.

Caws writes of her formal, stylish parents, her rebellious and deeply admired sister, and her artistic grandmother, whom she respected and idolized more than anyone else. She describes her marriage and subsequent divorce, her bouts with therapy, her children, and her growth as a student and writer. Throughout the memoir is evidence of her love for writing, teaching, art, and poetry as well as her deep respect for the people in her life that ultimately guided her into her career.

Mary Ann Caws describes Southern society and her own life with fondness, nostalgia, and a tinge of honest criticism. The carefully selected details and delicate balance of sentiment and fact bring readers into the fascinating, complicated, and all-too-real world of Caws’s—and our own—past.