New Books in Language and Translation

Are we currently experiencing a Yiddish renaissance? This is one of the questions we are often asked at YIVO. YIVO’s own community of Yiddish learners has expanded more than 10-fold in the last two years. Duolingo has added Yiddish as a language. Headline after headline touts Yiddish as unexpectedly alive and well. What does this all mean for Yiddish in the 21st century?

Join YIVO for a conversation about the Yiddish world today. Led by YIVO’s Director of Public Programs Alex Weiser, this program will feature journalist and playwright Rokhl Kafrissen, scholar and In Geveb Editor-in-chief Jessica Kirzane, scholar and Yiddish podcast founder and host Sandra Fox, and YIVO’s Director of Education Ben Kaplan.

This panel discussion originally took place on June 1, 2022.
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In this episode of the New Books Network, we talk with Jeremy Tiang about his English translation of The Formosa Exchange (Honford Star, 2026)—which will be released on September 18, 2026 (but is available for preorder).Tiang is a novelist, playwright, and translator based in New York. He has translated more than thirty books from Chinese to English—including Zou Jingzhi's Ninth Building, longlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize—and has served as a judge for the National Book Award for translated literature. Beyond translation, his novel State of Emergency won the Singapore Literature Prize in 2018, and his play Salesman之死 won a Obie Award for Outstanding New Play in 2023.

Originally published in Mandarin in 2021 as 新寶島 and winner of that year's Taiwan Literature Award, The Formosa Exchange is a work of speculative fiction by Taiwanese novelist Huang Chongkai (黃崇凱). The novel kicks off with a fantastical occurrence: one night, the entire populations of Taiwan and Cuba swap places, with Taiwanese people ending up on the island of Cuba and Cuban people on the island of Taiwan. This “Great Exchange” becomes a lens for examining national identity, indigeneity, and colonialism, especially with reference to Taiwan’s and Cuba's shared position in the shadow of their much larger neighbors of China and the United States.

Scholars and learners across history, political science, anthropology, literature, and beyond will find much food for thought in The Formosa Exchange. The novel is dense with allusions—it nods to Western thinkers like John Mearsheimer and Claude Lévi-Strauss, while also weaving in references to Taiwanese and Cuban literature, art, and film.

Anthony Kao is a writer who intersects international affairs and cultural criticism. He founded/edits Cinema Escapist—a publication exploring the sociopolitical context behind global film and television—and also writes for outlets like The Guardian, Al Jazeera, The Diplomat, and Eater.
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The Death of the Author and Anticolonial Thought (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) promises
to transform a decades old debate in literary studies about the
relation between structure and agency, form and intention by giving a
detailed account—previously unstudied—of the way colonized writers have
responded to, learned from, and critiqued the death of the author
postulate declared by Roland Barthes in 1967. The book is a cultural
history of these debates—with a particular focus on two crucial two key
case studies, Martinican poet and thinker Édouard Glissant and
Palestinian literary and cultural critic Edward Said, this book, then,
examines the immediate emergence and intensification of such responses
to the postulate of the author’s deathly absence from the text, in order
to suggest that metropolitan literary theory drew both critique and
engagement from scholars of black, decolonial and Global South
background from both before 1967 and Barthes’s declaration and in its
wake. This book provides a focused account of the early history of the
way global literatures have engaged with, critiqued, and occasionally
adopted the lessons and limitations of the poststructuralist critique of
that most fetishized and also reviled of figures: the author.

Matthis
Frickhoeffer is a scholar of critical theory and French thought with a
background in literature studies, linguistics and art theory. His work
focuses on questions of form, semiotics, and intertextuality. He teaches
at the University of Texas at Dallas.
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The Red Wind Howls (Columbia UP, 2025) is an unsettling, gripping, and darkly funny novel by Tsering Döndrup, one of modern Tibet’s most celebrated writers. First self-published in 2006 after no publisher was willing to take the political risk, the novel traces Tibetan experiences under Mao Zedong’s rule, from the 1958 Amdo uprising and the Great Leap Forward to the Cultural Revolution. Through a nonsequential narrative that moves back and forth between characters and events, The Red Wind Howls weaves together experiences of labor camps, unrelenting hunger, environmental devastation, and the destruction of language into a powerful exploration of twentieth-century Tibetan history.

In this episode, I speak with the novel’s translator, Christopher Peacock, about the challenges of translating a work that weaves together oral storytelling and history. We discuss the recurring character Alak Drong, the novel’s striking use of dark humor, the ways its characters navigate famine, labor camps, political campaigns, and shifting systems of survival, and above all the importance of reading literature by Tibetan authors.

Listeners should also seek out Chris’s translation of Tsering Döndrup’s short story collection, The Handsome Monk and Other Stories, and his article on the use of language in Tsering Döndrup’s fiction, here.
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The Holocaust radically altered the way many East European Jews spoke Yiddish. Finding prewar language incapable of describing the imprisonment, death, and dehumanization of the Holocaust, prisoners added or reinvented thousands of Yiddish words and phrases to describe their new reality. These crass, witty, and sometimes beautiful Yiddish words – Khurbn Yiddish, or “Yiddish of the Holocaust” – puzzled and intrigued the East European Jews who were experiencing the metamorphosis of their own tongue in real time. Sensing that Khurbn Yiddish words harbored profound truths about what Jews endured during the Holocaust, some Yiddish speakers threw themselves into compiling dictionaries and glossaries to document and analyze these new words. Others incorporated Khurbn Yiddish into their poetry and prose. In Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish, Hannah Pollin-Galay uses cultural history, philology, and literary interpretation to explore Khurbn Yiddish as a form of Holocaust memory and as a testament to the sensation of speech under genocidal conditions.

Join YIVO for a discussion with Pollin-Galay about this new book, led by historian Samuel Kassow.

Buy the book: here

This book talk originally took place on December 2, 2024.
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