At Found in Translation , this September we celebrate food in translated literature. Meals in books are never just meals: they carry...

Literature, like food, is, in Terry Eagleton’s words, “endlessly interpretable,” and food, like literature, “looks like an object but is...

Written in the 16th century by Wu Cheng'en, Journey to the West is one of China’s Four Great Classical Novels. Spanning 100 chapters, it tells a fictionalized and fantastical account of the pilgrimage of the Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang, who traveled to India in the 7th century to collect sacred Buddhist texts.

For much of literary history, translation has been the quiet art behind the louder world of authorship. It is an act of listening and re-speaking, of carrying meaning across the borders of language and culture. And while the names of male translators have often been preserved in marble and ink, women have been at work here, too — sometimes celebrated, more often erased.