Episode #40 Jessica Moore
by Anna Bowen

For our fourtieth Bookish Radio episode, we have an interview with now Toronto-based translator, poet, and singer songwriter Jessica Moore.  Moore is the author of original poetry collection Everything, Now (Brick 2012). She is the translator of The Greats (Bookthug 2017) by Sylvain Prudhomme and Turkana Boy (Talonbooks 2012), a poetic novel by Jean-Francois Beauchemin which won her a PEN America Translation Award. She has also translated two novels by French author Maylis de Kerangal, Birth of a Bridge (Talonbooks 2014) and Mend the Living (MacLehose Press 2016). Mend the Living was longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker international Prize and won the Wellcome Book Prize in 2017.

Jessica is currently working on a new original work, “The Whole Singing Ocean,” a story in poetic fragments.

Here we chat about what it’s like to get behind the words of someone else’s text, what the creative process is like for translation, and what, if anything, is left behind when a text moves from one language and culture to another.

The music is from Jessica Moore’s album Beautiful in Red 2013, available on bandcamp.