Articles Tagged “Poetry ”
A poem from Madagascar
Around Valentine's Day, the go-to book for romantic African literature in translation has to be Bending the Bow: An Anthology of African Love Poetry. One of its many gems is this poem by Flavien Ranaivo of Madagascar, first published in The Negritude Poets: An Anthology of Translations from the French…...read more »
Ilya on Poetry in Poetry
The March issue of Poetry includes Adam Kirsch's thrilling interview with Ilya Kaminsky about our Ecco Anthology of International Poetry. With the erudite brilliance that characterizes his introduction, Ilya notes the French source of a Yeats poem popular in China, cites Seamus Heaney's…...read more »
Interview with Laura Healy, translator of Roberto Bolaño’s “The Romantic Dogs”
This interview with Laura Healy, translator of Roberto Bolaño's poetry, is part of our month long look at international poetry and celebration of the release of The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry by the editors of Words Without Borders. This interview was a collaboration…...read more »
On Poetry in Translation
The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry has been out for a couple of weeks now, and as we await the critical response, I think of the most satisfying poetry review I read last year: Jon Stallworthy, writing in the TLS of December 4, 2009, on Clare Cavanagh's translation of Adam Zagajewski's…...read more »
One Poem, Two Translations: A Three-Way Conversation
When I was starting out as a translator in the late 1980s, 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei had caused a stir in American poetry and translation circles. Eliot Weinberger and Octavio Paz had taken a four-line Chinese poem, over a millennium old, and presented it together with nineteen very different…...read more »
A gift suggestion for the Günter Grass fan on your list
If there’s a Günter Grass reader on your Christmas list, you’ve probably already thought about giving him or her a copy of The Box: Tales from the Darkroom, the quasi-novel quasi-memoir that came out last month from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in a translation by Krishna Winston. The Boxis…...read more »
The City and the Writer: In Los Angeles with Dorothy Barresi
If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains. …...read more »
The City and the Writer: In Washington, D.C. with E. Ethelbert Miller
If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains. …...read more »
Artists Talk: Israel/Palestine. “Sheikh Jarrah, 2010.” A Poem by Almog Behar
Translated from the Hebrew by Chana Morgenstern. Almog Behar Is a Mizrahi (Jew of Arab descent) writer, literary critic and activist involved in the solidarity movement against the eviction of Palestinian families from East Jerusalem. Behar is also actively engaged in a small but vibrant…...read more »
Fragments of Sappho
The Greek poet Sappho, who lived on the island of Lesbos from around 630 BC, was a singer and songwriter who wrote nine volumes of verse lyrics. Of all this work, only one poem has survived intact. Yet she is remembered more than two millennia later. If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sapphois a handsomely…...read more »
Japan, One Year Later
On March 11, 2011, Tokyo was rocked by a violent earthquake and tsunami that triggered an accident at a nuclear power plant. We mark the anniversary with poems by two Japanese writers, both translated by Jeffrey Angles. In "Do Not Tremble," Ohsaki Sayaka finds the shifting earth "an unruly cradle …...read more »
Teaching in Translation: Poet as Translator
Editor's note: This essay was delivered at the panel "Teaching Translation in the Workshop," organized by Douglas Unger and with presentations by Jason Grunebaum, Becka McKay, Malena Morling, and Douglas Unger, at the Associated Writing Programs conference, March 2, 2012. Other panelists' presentations…...read more »
Celebrating World Poetry Day
Today is World Poetry Day, and in celebration we invite you to explore our rich archives. Start with Ilya Kaminsky's brilliant manifesto on poetry in translation, "Correspondences in the Air," from our Ecco Anthology of International Poetry, and then turn to the nearly six hundred poems we've…...read more »
From the Translator: Working with the Author
Editor's note: Translator Samantha Schnee worked closely with author Carmen Boullosa throughout the translation of the latter's "Sleepless Homeland." The following exchange, with its multiple rounds of drafts, queries, and responses, provides an instructive glimpse of the process. Did we lose…...read more »
Poetry from the Horn of Africa
Launched in November 2011, Warscapes magazine has taken on an unusual niche: the art and literature of war zones around the world. On March 6, Warscapes hosted An Evening of Poetry from the Horn of Africa in the headquarters of Alwan for the Arts near the tip of Manhattan on Beaver Street. The event…...read more »
Day Three at the London Book Fair
The highlight of the third and final day at the Literary Translation Center was a conversation among poets, editors, and translators about an exciting new book of contemporary Chinese poetry. The book is called Jade Ladder—and the panelists discussing it, and related subjects, sounded like…...read more »
On “Fish Variations”
Fish Variations has a very particular phonetic structure that throws up special challenges for the translator. Here are a few comments on these challenges and how I addressed them. Both original poem and translation have seven verses. The first four verses and the final verse are linked by vowel patterns,…...read more »
The Restoration of “Solar Throat Slashed”
Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, the best-known work of the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, appeared in book form in 1947. A year later Césaire published Soleil cou coupé, an extraordinary collection of seventy-two poems. In this book, writes A. James Arnold in the introduction…...read more »