Translating a Crisis

You can’t translate something without interpreting it,” says Amanda Doxtater. “And there is a sense of responsibility to the author. I’m bringing this novel to English-speaking audiences for the first time.”

Sometimes a book grabs hold of a reader and won’t let go. For Amanda Doxtater, that book was the 1934 novel Kris by Swedish author Karin Boye. Doxtater first encountered the novel in the 1990s as an undergraduate in the UW Department of Scandinavian Studies, and it became the subject of her master’s thesis, also at the UW. Now she is a professor in the same department and has completed the first English translation of the novel,...