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Contributor

Peter Constantine

Portrait of translator Peter Constantine
Copyright © Annette Hornischer
Contributor

Peter Constantine

Peter Constantine’s recent translations include works by Augustine, Solzhenitsyn, Rousseau, Machiavelli, Gogol, and Tolstoy. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and was awarded the PEN Translation Prize for Six Early Stories by Thomas Mann, and the National Translation Award for The Undiscovered Chekhov. He is the director of the Program in Literary Translation at the University of Connecticut, the publisher of World Poetry Books, and editor-in-chief of New Poetry in Translation.

Articles by Peter Constantine

COVID-19
By Arlinda Guma
In Germany the statue of Marx is playing chess with the family doctor
Translated from Albanian by Peter Constantine
The Translator Relay: Peter Constantine
By Peter Constantine
Our “Translator Relay” series features a new interview each month. This month's translator will choose the next interviewee, adding a different, sixth question. This month, Katherine Silver…
One Poem, Two Translations: A Three-Way Conversation
By Peter Constantine
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…
Musings of a Terminal Speaker
By Peter Constantine
The death of a language is rarely sudden: it is usually an unremarkable process of decline as a community gradually changes its linguistic allegiance, dropping an ancient mother-tongue for a stronger…
Kaspar Hauser in a Desolate Land from “The Double Book”
By Dimitris Chatzis
I haven't seen that chain-smoking Spanish girl for days.
Translated from Greek by Peter Constantine
Chinese Woman’s Spirit
By Marigo Alexopoulou
The driver peers into his rearview mirror. / You are not there.
Translated from Greek by Peter Constantine
The Thief
By Marigo Alexopoulou
One day I came back and he wasn't there.
Translated from Greek by Peter Constantine
McDonald’s
By Marcin Swietlicki
I find the trace of your teeth in the foreign town.
Translated from Polish by Peter Constantine
The Way You Might Break a Finger
By Amanda Michalopoulou
One has to be contemplating suicide to paint a room brown. Now it looks a bit better.
Translated from Greek by Peter Constantine
The Oracles of the Virgin
By Stylianos S. Charkianakis
Buried inside us were the sounds / of the songs we heard in the cradle
Translated from Greek by Peter Constantine
Elegy
By Stylianos S. Charkianakis
However many times I now set out / on the road of return
Translated from Greek by Peter Constantine
The Two Boys
By Anonymous (from George Borrow)
Two Romany boys were sent, / sent across the great sea.
Translated from Romany by Peter Constantine
Multilingual
Scots: The Auld an Nobill Tung
By Peter Constantine
What is Scots? Is it Gaelic? A dialect of English? English with a Gaelic brogue? A hodgepodge of English and Gaelic?
Love Song
By Anonymous (from George Borrow)
The pond of your breastsMy pillow shall be;Your eyes my moonsLike silver shine.Wait, my girl!Don’t go away:What if I will not see you,Ever again?
Translated from Romany by Peter Constantine
Multilingual
Eagles
By Kader Abdolah
My father was born in one of those villages, and my brother lies buried in the mountains.
Translated from Dutch by Peter Constantine