Ellen Elias-Bursać (born 1952) is an American scholar and literary translator. Specializing in South Slavic literature, she has translated numerous works from Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian.
Early life
Ellen Elias was born in
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. As part of the Boston metropolitan area, the cities population of the 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the fourth most populous city in the state, behind Boston, ...
Commonwealth School
Commonwealth School is a private high school of about 155 students and 35 faculty members located in the Back Bay neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, United States. It is accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges.
Hist ...
in Boston, graduating in 1970. She attended
Macalester College
Macalester College () is a private liberal arts college in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Founded in 1874, Macalester is exclusively an undergraduate four-year institution and enrolled 2,174 students in the fall of 2018 from 50 U.S. states, four U.S te ...
, receiving a
Bachelor of Arts
Bachelor of arts (BA or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts degree course is generally completed in three or four years ...
degree in Russian literature and language in 1974.
During her undergraduate studies, she attended a study abroad programme in
. She worked as a freelance translator, and studied towards a master's degree at the University of Zagreb.
In 1999, she received a PhD from
University of Zagreb
The University of Zagreb ( hr, Sveučilište u Zagrebu, ; la, Universitas Studiorum Zagrabiensis) is the largest Croatian university and the oldest continuously operating university in the area covering Central Europe south of Vienna and all of ...
in
philology
Philology () is the study of language in oral and writing, written historical sources; it is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics (with especially strong ties to etymology). Philology is also defin ...
; her dissertation was titled ''Augustina-Tina Ujevića prijevodi iz anglo-američke književnosti: komparativno/kontrastivna lingvo-stilistička analiza''.
Career
Elias-Bursać worked as a language preceptor in the Slavic department of
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...
for 10 years. In 2005, she joined the English Translation Unit of the
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was a body of the United Nations that was established to prosecute the war crimes that had been committed during the Yugoslav Wars and to try their perpetrators. The tribunal ...
(ICTY), in
The Hague
The Hague ( ; nl, Den Haag or ) is a city and municipality of the Netherlands, situated on the west coast facing the North Sea. The Hague is the country's administrative centre and its seat of government, and while the official capital of ...
. Since leaving the ICTY she has been working as a free-lance translator, an independent scholar, and a contributing editor to ''
Asymptote
In analytic geometry, an asymptote () of a curve is a line such that the distance between the curve and the line approaches zero as one or both of the ''x'' or ''y'' coordinates tends to infinity. In projective geometry and related contexts, ...
''. She is a past president of the American Literary Translators Association.
Works
Translations
; From Bosnian
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; From Croatian
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* with David Williams
; From Serbian
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AATSEEL
The American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL) is an academic organization founded in 1941. AATSEEL holds an annual conference each January and publishes the ''Slavic and East European Journal'' (SEEJ), a pee ...
Award for best translation from a Slavic or East European language for
David Albahari
David Albahari (, ; born 15 March 1948)Biography at
's ''Words are Something Else''. In 2006, she was given the
National Translation Award The National Translation Award is awarded annually by the American Literary Translators Association for literary translators who have made an outstanding contribution to literature in English by masterfully recreating the artistic force of a book of ...
for Albahari's ''Götz and Meyer''. Her translation of ''Trieste'' by