Found in Translation: Literary Scholar Jan Steyn Charts a Course Through Language

Jan Steyn ’08 and G’10’ explores language, literature, and culture through translation, scholarship, and teaching.

When it comes to the intersections of languages, cultures, and ideas, “I'm like a kid on a playground,” says Jan Steyn ’08 and G’10. A literary scholar, translator, and educator, Steyn has built a creative career exploring these intersections and now fosters intellectual community around them as Associate Professor of Instruction, Literary Translation and French at the University of Iowa.

Steyn grew up in Alberton, a town outside Johannesburg, South Africa, where his first language was Afrikaans. At the age of 13, he began learning English while attending an English-speaking school, a challenging yet engaging transition that sparked a lifelong curiosity. “That initial linguistic shift was formative,” he says. “I enjoyed moving between languages, especially helping my Afrikaans-speaking friends figure out how to play English-language computer games.”

Steyn deepened this exploration within AUP’s rich multicultural environment. He describes his studies as “life-changing in every way,” and says he cherished the small classes, international student body and exceptional professors—especially in the literature program, where he found mentors who helped make his experience even more meaningful. Initially drawn to film and communications, he followed the advice of Daniel Gunn, Distinguished AUP Professor of Comparative Literature and founder of the Center for Writers and Translators, and Geoffrey Gilbert, Professor of Comparative Literature, to enroll in literature courses. This led him to complete a BA in Comparative Literature, during which he spent a year at the University of California Irvine in an exchange program before returning to Paris to earn an MA in AUP’s former Cultural Translation program.

Comparative Literature and English

The Letters of Samuel Beckett

University of Iowa

In Gunn, Steyn gained not just an advisor, but a career-long collaborator. Gunn supervised Steyn’s first literary translation, the experimental diary Journal by Alix Cléo Roubaud—an uncommon opportunity for a beginning translator, made possible by AUP and Dalkey Archive Press. As an intern, Steyn contributed to the compilation and publications of The Letters of Samuel Beckett (Cambridge University Press, 2016), a groundbreaking four-volume edition of Beckett’s extensive correspondence and an international scholarly project for which Gunn served as Paris director. The project’s base in the United States was at Emory University in Atlanta, where Steyn later completed a two-year fellowship before continuing his studies at Cornell University, earning a second MA and eventually a PhD in Comparative Literature in 2018.

Since then, Steyn has held what he calls “a dream job” at the University of Iowa (UI), a global hub for literary culture often referred to as “The Writing University.” Located in Iowa City, a UNESCO City of Literature, UI is home to the renowned Iowa Writers’ Workshop—the first graduate level creative writing program in the United States—and the International Writing Program, a residency that has hosted writers from over 160 countries since 1967. “Swing anything, and you’ll hit a writer–that's the joke with Iowa City,” says Steyn.

The program that Steyn directs nurtures a diverse community of translators, from recent graduates to PhD students, and from aspiring translators to scholars and academics, students working across 17 languages—ranging from Sanskrit and Russian to Urdu and Latin—and coming together in Steyn’s multilingual translation workshops. In addition to teaching translation and French, Steyn also teaches courses on translation theory, global science fiction and unconventional topics, such as a recent course on Congolese literature.

Steyn’s creative and professional pursuits extend beyond the classroom. He edited Translation: Crafts, Contexts, Consequences (Cambridge University Press, 2022), an interdisciplinary collection of essays aimed at broadening interest in translation. Gunn, who initiated the project before passing it to Steyn, contributed an essay alongside other AUP-affiliated scholars. Steyn is currently translating Kompoun (Kwela, 2021), a novel by South African poet Ronelda Kamfer written in Kaaps, a form of Afrikaans, and relishes engaging with “a different set of dictionaries and problems.”

Steyn sees a growing interest in translation studies, with schools nationwide launching new programs and degrees. “World literature and translation as a field is growing. And we’re growing alongside them.” He attributes the surge in part to a counter-reaction against rising nationalism and the expansion of small, specialized presses publishing more diverse titles each year. He also highlights AUP’s robust, intergenerational network of faculty and alumni shaping the field through teaching, publishing, and literary translation worldwide.

Translation matters, Steyn says, “because it's powerful. Without translation, there's no world literature—that encounter of otherness and beautiful narratives from elsewhere.” But he acknowledges the complexity of its impact. “People make strong ethical claims about translation preventing world wars and helping us towards perpetual peace…there's no colonialism without translation, either. What we do is we empower translators to exercise their judgment.” And the work—with its shifting contexts and dynamic conversations—is so much fun.