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Contributor

Clare Cavanagh

Contributor

Clare Cavanagh

Scholar and translator Clare Cavanagh is the Frances Hooper Professor in the Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University, where she teaches in the department of Slavic languages and literatures. She is one of the preeminent translators of contemporary Polish poetry, and has translated numerous collections from poets including Czesław Milosz, Wisława Szymborska, and Adam Zagajewski. Cavanagh’s many awards for translation include the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets, the John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize in Translation, the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize for Outstanding Literary Translation, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and the Harold Langdon Prize for Translation from the Academy of American Poets. Cavanagh’s work has also appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and other periodicals. She is the author of Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West (2010), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition (1995), which received the AATSEEL Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Book in Slavic Literature.

 

Articles by Clare Cavanagh

Rows of headstones in a cemetery
Kgbo, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Name Day
By Adam Zagajewski
I wasn’t sure how to pray for the dead / in such tumult, in the shriek of recollection.
Translated from Polish by Clare Cavanagh
[Why don’t I have]
By Bronisław Maj
I believe too little that I see? Or perhaps this / is simply the thirst
Translated from Polish by Clare Cavanagh
[I lie with my face low]
By Bronisław Maj
Salty sweat floods its eyes / and mine. The lark is already there,
Translated from Polish by Clare Cavanagh
Where Did I Wake Up
By Stanisław Barańczak
Take it easy, that's my body / on its back
Translated from Polish by Clare Cavanagh
A record plays on a turntable
Photo by Jace & Afsoon on Unsplash
Music Heard with You
By Adam Zagajewski
Grave Brahms and elegiac Schubert, / a few songs, Chopin's third sonata
Translated from Polish by Clare Cavanagh