The Ghost in the Sentence

What happens to a story when it crosses a border? In this seven-part series, acclaimed literary translator Shelly Bryant explores the art — and the haunting — of translation. Rather than focusing on what survives the journey from one language to another, The Ghost in the Sentence turns our attention to what does not: the echoes that fade, the wordplay that dies on arrival, the histories that refuse to cross, and the silences that become part of the meaning itself. Every text is haunted by the past — by a writer’s influences, by cultural memory, by the voices that came before. Translation is haunted twice over, with ghosts whispering in two languages at once. This series asks how translators make peace with those hauntings: how they choose what to carry forward, what to let go, and how absence itself can become a form of fidelity. Drawing on examples from literature around the world — from Hamlet to Liaozhai Zhiyi, from Toni Morrison to Primo Levi, from Bashō to Kafka — and from Shelly’s own award-winning translations, these sessions explore the ethical, emotional, and creative dimensions of what translation inevitably loses — and what it uniquely gains. 💡 What You’ll Learn • Why “every text is haunted” — and how translation amplifies the echoes. • How puns, rhythms, and tonal play resist translation, and what strategies translators use to bridge the gap. • How cultural trauma and historical context haunt texts — and how those ghosts change when read in a new language. • Why silence, ambiguity, and absence are not failures, but essential parts of meaning. • How translation is an act of ethical choice — one that expands the “guest list” of voices speaking across time and culture. Bonus Content: Includes an extended essay comparing Paul Celan’s Todesfuge and Sheng Keyi’s Death Fugue, exploring how a 20th-century poem and a 21st-century novel speak across language, time, and political context.