Literary translation a fascinating hobby for York professor

Michiel Horn (left), history professor at York’s Glendon College, has made a hobby out of literary translation over the past nine years, work he says he finds “endlessly fascinating, and I am more than willing to bend any listener’s ear on the subject.”


Recently, Dutch-born Horn completed a translation into English of a story in Dutch by Maarten ‘t Hart, whose novels and collections of short stories and essays are bestsellers in Holland and, in translation, in Germany and several other European countries. The story, Midsummer in April, has as its theme global climate change.


Horn has completed another translation of a novel, which will be published in the UK and the US in 2004.


Among the more recent books he has written and published are Academic Freedom in Canada: A History (University of Toronto Press, 1999), and Becoming Canadian: Memoirs of an Invisible Immigrant (University of Toronto Press, 1997).