Susan Bernofsky | |
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 Susan Bernofsky speaking atswissnex San Francisco on April 3, 2013 | |
| Born | (1966-07-20)July 20, 1966 (age 59) |
Susan Bernofsky (born 1966) is an American translator ofGerman-language literature and author.
Susan Bernofsky is best known for bringing theSwiss writerRobert Walser to the attention of the English-speaking world (in a "second wave" after the work ofChristopher Middleton),[1] translating many of his books and writing his biography. She has also translated several books byJenny Erpenbeck andYoko Tawada. She holds an MFA in Fiction fromWashington University in St. Louis and a PhD in Comparative Literature fromPrinceton University. Her prizes for translation include the 2006Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize, the 2012Calw Hermann Hesse Prize, the 2015Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the 2015Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and the 2015Schlegel-Tieck Prize. She was also selected for aGuggenheim Fellowship in 2014.[2] In 2017, she won theWarwick Prize for Women in Translation for her translation ofMemoirs of a Polar Bear byYoko Tawada. In 2018 she was awarded theMLA's Lois Roth Award for her translation ofGo, Went, Gone byJenny Erpenbeck.[3] In 2024, Bernofsky was reported to be working on a translation ofThomas Mann'sThe Magic Mountain.[4]
She teaches atColumbia University. In April 2024, she was one of 23 Jewish professors at Columbia (including sixBarnard College professors) to sign an open letter to Columbia presidentMinouche Shafik, calling congressional investigations of antisemitism on university campuses "a new McCarthyism" intended "to rehearse and amplify decades-long bad-faith efforts to undermine universities as sites of learning, critical thinking, and knowledge production" and alleging a widespread effort to silence "Palestinian narratives and analyses on campus." The letter she signed declared that "today’s attacks on the university [because of alleged climate hostile to Jewish and Israeli students] are not truly about antisemitism."[5] A shorter version of this letter was published in theColumbia Daily Spectator.[6]
In April 2024, she defendedstudent protesters at Columbia University who were calling for an end to Israel’s war in Gaza and for divestment from companies supplying it with military-related products.[7]
