email: mnr.dns@verizon.net

Born in Manchester in 1943, Donald Nicholson-Smith is a longtime resident of New York City.  Since the 1970s he has been an academic and literary translator. After translating Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis’s magisterial concordance to Freud, Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse as The Language of Psychoanalysis (London and New York, 1973), he made psychology and psychoanalysis one of his specialities (Henri Wallon, Piaget, Derrida on psychoanalysis, etc.). On another front, he has translated many texts of the Situationist International, including that group’s major works, namely Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (New York, 1994)  and Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life (third, revised edition, Oakland, 2012), as well as Henri Lefebvre’s major work The Production of Space (Oxford, 1991). In recent years Nicholson-Smith has tackled more strictly literary projects. In 2011 he was a French-American Foundation Prize finalist (non-fiction) for his translation of the poems and correspondence in Guillaume Appollinaire’s Letters to Madeleine, as sent from the Champagne trenches in 1915. And he has been active in the field of noir fiction, translating Thierry Jonquet’s Mygale/Tarantula (San Francisco, 2002); Yasmina Khadra’s Cousin K (Lincoln, Nebraska, 2013), in collaboration with Alyson Waters; and several novels by Jean-Patrick Manchette, including Three to Kill (San Francisco, 2002), Fatale (New York, 2011),  Ivory Pearl (New York, 1917), Nada (New York, 2019), and The N’Gustro Affair (New York, 2021). Luc Lang’s Cruel Tales from the Thirteenth Floor, from the University of Nebraska Press, is another of his contributions to this genre.

Nicholson-Smith is a member of the Translators’ Association of the Society of Authors (London) and of the American PEN Translators’ Group (New York). He has been dubbed Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in recognition of his services to French literature in translation, and in 2014 he was awarded the French-American Foundation’s fiction translation prize for Manchette’s The Mad and the Bad.

His translation of a collection of poems self-selected by the dissident Moroccan author Abdellatif Laâbi, In Praise of Defeat (New York, 2016), was a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize (Toronto) in 2017. He has also translated graphic (comic-book) works by Nicole Claveloux, Yvan Alagbe, and Golo. Forthcoming as of 2023: Sublimation, by Jean Laplanche and Fag Hag, by Lola Miesseroff.