Articles

Showing 1-17 of 17 articles
  • Translator’s Notes

    By Richard Zenith
    Fernando Pessoa's most restless, extravagant, and prolific heteronym, Álvaro de Campos was supposedly born in 1890 (two years after Pessoa), attended university in Glasgow, sailed around the Far ...
  • Translator’s Notes

    By David Wheatley
    Seán Ó Ríordáin’s “Malairt” (“Switch”) is a poem all about transformations. Piero di Cosimo was in the habit of painting human faces on animals (as in The Forest Fire), and in “Switch” Ó Ríordáin explores ...
  • Translator’s Notes

    By Gwyneth Lewis
    Translating Dafydd ap Gwilym into anything but a line-by-line prose gloss is an extreme technical challenge. You can see the magisterial new edition of Dafydd ap Gwilym’s poems complete, with free...
  • Translator’s Notes

    By Jennifer Grotz
    In the United States, Jerzy Ficowski is best known as the author of Regions of the Great Heresy, the foundational work of literary biography and criticism of the writer and artist Bruno Schulz, shot by the...
  • Translator’s Notes

    By Suji Kwock Kim
    A recent article in The Korea Times comments, “If there is a national poet, it may well be Ko Un.” The intersection of personal and national history, in his case, is both ordinary and extraordinary. As a boy...
  • Translator’s Notes

    By Rosanna Warren
    Max Jacob’s verse poems are dissonant and hybrid, mingling traditional metrics and free verse, with irregular punctuation, clashing registers of diction, and cockeyed allusions, puns, and cliches...
  • Translator’s Notes

    By Valzhyna Mort
    Grigori Dashevsky and I discussed my translation of his poem “Ithaca” in May of 2013. In July, having reviewed fresh corrections, he signed a publication contract with Poetry. In December, after a long illness...
  • Translator’s Notes

    By Zackary Sholem Berger
    In 1973, the Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever, after ghetto survival, guerilla warfare, and post-war wandering, began publishing what he called his “Diary Poems” (“Lider fun togbukh”) in the literary...
  • Translator’s Notes

    By Mary Ann Caws
    In Yves Bonnefoy’s remarkable poetic prose of Le Grand Espace, concerning the Louvre and its Great Space in all its complications—of placing, maintaining, viewing—he cites one of Poussin’s lessons, perhaps the most ...
  • Translator’s Notes

    By A.E. Stallings
    Despite the neo-con vision of early liberty-loving patriots in the film 300, Ancient Sparta was a totalitarian state which depended upon an enslaved population of Helots. Still, it is hard not to find its ...
  • Translator’s Notes

    By John Ashbery
    What are the Illuminations? Originally an untitled, unpaginated bunch of manuscript pages that Arthur Rimbaud handed to his former lover Paul Verlaine on the occasion of their last meeting, in Stuttgart in...
    Arthur Rimbaud
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