Always in Motion: Cities, Languages, Histories

Sherry Simon is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the French Department at Concordia University. Born in Montreal, she has made this city the inspiration for her writings on translation, cultural history, and multilingual cities. Among her publications are Translating Montreal: Episodes in the Life of a Divided City (2006), Cities in Translation: Intersections of Language and Memory (2012), and Translation Sites: A Field Guide (2019). She has edited or co-edited several collections, including Translation Effects: The Shaping of Modern Canadian Culture (2014) (with Kathy Mezei and Luise von Flotow) and Speaking Memory: How Translation Shapes City Life (2016). Her most recent essay, in French, is “Promenades polyglottes,” a reflection on Montreal’s Mount Royal Park. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a member of the Académie des lettres du Québec. Her books have been translated into several languages, including Polish, and most recently Turkish.

Krzysztof Majer is Assistant Professor in the Department of North American Literature and Culture at the University of Lodz, Poland. His research interests include contemporary American and Canadian fiction, musico-literary intermediality, and translation studies. He has edited Beirut to Carnival City: Reading Rawi Hage and co-edited, among others, a special issue of the European Journal of American Studies (“Obsessions in Melville and Hawthorne,” with Justyna Fruzińska). He serves as editor at Text Matters and Literatura na Świecie. A literary translator into Polish (e.g., of David Markson, John Barth, Herman Melville, Amy Hempel, Deborah Eisenberg, Abdulrazak Gurnah, the Kerouac-Ginsberg letters), he was a resident at the Banff International Literary Translation Centre. Recently, he has co-translated into English (with Sylvia Söderlind) the post-Holocaust correspondence of Chava Rosenfarb and Zenia Larsson (Letters from the Afterlife, edited by Goldie Morgentaler, McGill-Queen’s UP, 2025).