Something’s lost in the translation—is that the poetry? And something’s gained: the illusion that homo sapiens actually communicate—is that the illusion which results in God? These are the queries in Raymond Federman’s ‘Reflections Concerning the Translation of Poetry.’
Tigrinya poet Reesom Haile brings African poetry into the 21st century — here is a sequence of his short poems, translated into English for us by Charles Cantalupo.
José Ignacio Silva A. reports on the American delegation of poets -- Martín Espada, Yusef Komunyakaa & Nathalie Handal, led by Rattapallax editor Ram Devineni -- who travelled to Chile this past July to celebrate Pablo Neruda’s 100th birthday and to launch the magazine in Latin America.
Notes from the 9th Reunión de Escritores Hispanoamericanos in Sonora, Mexico, by Silvia Antonia Brandon Pérez.
Annetna Nepo publishes poems in any language,
not translations -- to recreate on paper the feel of “a train-station situated in some key international town, everyone speaking their own tongue... with the constant feeling of being both at home and estranged via language.” Biannual print editions of new international poetry; monthly online bulletins of interviews & experimental poetry.
Rudy Negenborn has collected the original Latin texts & translations of the poems of this greatest of Latin lyric poets into six modern languages, including
English &
Estonian.
At the University of Texas at Dallas, the Center offers translation workshops & publishes
Translation Review & through Mundus Artium Press, a series of contemporary international poets in bilingual format.
The syllabus & reading list for
Charles Bernstein's course will keep you deeply busy thinking about poetics & translation.
Carthage College’s English department offers a selection of Cantos from the
Inferno in Dante's Italian or Allen Mandelbaum’s, Robert Pinsky’s, or John Ciardi’s English translations, or any two of these side-by-side, with hyperlinked notes -- worth hours of wandering! See, for instance,
Canto V with Pinsky’s & Dante’s lines paired, or
Canto XXXIII, comparing Pinsky’s & Ciardi’s translations.
From
RIF/T at the Buffalo
Electronic Poetry Center site, here's a transcript of the cyberdialogue on translation between Ernesto Livon Grosman, Loss Pequeño Glazier, and Kenneth Sherwood.
John F. Deane, its founding Secretary General, recounts the story of the founding of the European Academy of Poetry in 1996 for
The Irish Times on the occasion of their 2001 meeting in Dublin.
Here is a beautiful English/html
translation of Mallarmé’s poem by Alan Edwards, with a set of illustrations & the original French close at hand.
Sweet Briar College Spanish Professor Alex Ingber offers a collection of 101 English verse translations of sonnets from the Golden Age of Spanish poetry (16th century) -- from such poets as
Lope de Vega &
Miguel de Cervantes.
Filippos
Marinakis has made a collection of English translations of the 10th century Japanese poems Peter Greenaway used in his film of
The Pillow Book (of Sei Shonagon), backed with stills from the movie. Read, for instance,
The 7th Book, “The Book of Youth”: “The cover is becoming crisp like the / hardening of wood on a young tree. Its pages / are pliable and taste a little of salt.”
Poems Niederngasse is actually three separately edited journals: English, Spanish (edited by Silvia Brandon Pérez) & German (edited by Michaela A. Gabriel). Each offers new poems & new poets, poets to reread, & contests for unpublished poets.
Poems Niederngasse, published monthly, is the Web from which is spun the biannual print journal
Niederngasse.
The History of Poetry itself: not the history of footnotes and dust motes, but the vibrant, controversial and lush language of the world’s greatest writers -- from Sappho to Basho, from African chants to Nuyorican rants,
The SemiCento weaves 50 lines by 50 poets in 29 languages into a poetic fugue you can dance to.
German conceptualist poet & chief mischief maker Schuldt & the unstoppable Robert Kelly enraptured an unsuspecting populace in a dervish of poetry at the Poetry Project at St. Marks Church (NYC), with their homeophonic destruction of Friedrich Hölderlin's
Am Quell der Donau. Now
McPherson & Co. has published it as an exquisite Object.
A new digital anthology revealing poetry as a living art, promoting cultural exchange & tolerance through the power of the individual voice, preserving oral traditions & endangered languages.
