Peter Constantine

Peter Constantine (born 1963, London, United Kingdom) is a British and American award-winning literary translator who has translated literary works from German, Russian, French, Modern Greek, Ancient Greek, Italian, Albanian, Dutch, and Slovene.

Constantine was born to an Austrian mother and a British father of Turkish and Greek descent. He grew up in Athens, Greece before moving to the United States in 1983. In his first books, Japanese Street Slang and Japanese Slang: Uncensored he explored Japanese slang and criminal jargons in their many varieties, focusing on aspects of the Japanese language that had been traditionally marginalized. “Previously unprintable things that will inform, amuse, shock and maybe even disgust” (Joseph LaPenta: Daily Yomiuri Newspaper, December 6, 1992). In the early 1990s, Constantine began translating short stories and poetry from various European languages, publishing in literary magazines in the United States, Britain, and Australia. Since th