“Who is this super-sizing, spirit-crushing femme?” October 5, 2011: Let's just call this a homophonic translation so we can rationalize our enjoyment as literary instead of silly: by Harriet Staff

taking baudelaire and ingesting him from notwhich April 28, 2011: I've been asked to participate in an evening celebrating John Ashbery's new translations of Rimbaud's "Illuminations." The section entitled TALE resonated with where I felt my life was at this point — a bit groundless yet lit; my job in transition again, a few life curves to consider, your basic mirror-check with the other eye free in the ease [...] by Edwin Torres

Cooper writes a poem April 25, 2011: WHY I AM NOT A TODDLER By Cooper Bennett Burt I am not a toddler, I am a baby. Why? I think I would rather be a toddler, but I am not. Well, for instance, Nathan is starting a drawing. I drop in. "Sit down and have a snack," he says. I snack; we snack. I look up. He has pirates in it. "Yes, it needed pirates there." "Oh." I go and [...] by Stephen Burt

Haitian Fragments April 14, 2011: Five months after the earthquake of January 12, 2011, I sat in an elegant art gallery on the upper slopes of Petion Ville to talk to a gathering of Haitian poets. I was moonlighting while reporting on HIV AIDS in Haiti after the earthquake. I did not want to miss the chance to find out how the poets were responding to the earthquake. We talked, [...] by Kwame Dawes

A Poem by the Portuguese poet Ana Luísa Amaral April 11, 2011: It is hard to speak about contemporary European Poetry without differentiating between countries and even regions of countries. The same thing, of course, holds true for American poetry, though in different ways, especially if we – as we should – take an inclusive view of the Americas, not just looking at North America, and certainly not just [...] by Martin Earl

Poetry and adoption April 5, 2011: In my previous post, I was trying to wander from a poetics of exile to a discussion of adoption, but I didn’t quite make it. I guess that’s appropriate for a “poetics of non-arrival” (Judith Butler’s phrase re: Kafka). But I do want to bring some attention here to a new blog started by Eileen Tabios and devoted to the relationship [...] by Alan Gilbert

On translating Apollinaire: Pilgrims of Perdition March 30, 2011: For almost a year I’ve been working on a co-translation of Apollinaire’s Alcoolswith Jennifer Pap, a close friend and a scholar of twentieth-century French poetry. Our motivations for this project are manifold. First, we simply wanted to work together on something exciting and difficult. Second, we had noticed that only one full translation of [...] by Julie Carr

John Ashbery reads from his translation of Rimbaud at the New School February 18, 2011: Via The Best American Poetry, John Ashbery reads his translation of Arthur Rimbaud's "Promontory" from Illuminations. Originally published in 1886, Norton will release Ashbery's translation in May, though not with his above comments about scholars' endless attempts to track Rimbaud through Scarborough just because he mentions it in the poem. [...] by Poetry News

Recalculating translation no small feat (actual calculators help) February 11, 2011: Long Island University professor Gregary J. Racz is no stranger to translation, but this is probably the first time his process of "re-writing" involved "re-calculation." Racz just received the American Translators Association (ATA) Alicia Gordon Award for Word Artistry in Translation for his work on only twelve lines in a poem by Francisco Acuña [...] by Poetry News

“Linguistic resistance” in Book Smugglers documentary February 3, 2011: BOOK SMUGGLERS trailer from ERA FILM on Vimeo. Book Smugglers is a documentary exploring the risks taken by the Lithuanian "book smugglers" who fought to preserve their language and literature when the Russian Tsar Alexander II banned it from use in 1863. Books, newspapers and educational texts became contraband but the knygnešia kept them in [...] by Poetry News