Jhumpa Lahiri called literary translation an “act of radical change”. Valeria Luiselli referred to it as “a kind of fertile contamination”. Their sentiments reflect a shared belief: more than a mere reproduction of stories in new languages, literary translation is a creative art form.
“People tend to think that translation is a one-to-one or word-to-word movement, but that is rarely the case. When we translate, we need to capture both meaning and feeling,” explains Shelly Bryant, a writer, researcher and translator based in Singapore and Shanghai.
The Singapore Literature Prize-shortlisted translator’s vast body of work spans from
