Statue of Erasmus near the Collegium Trilingue in Louvain / Photo by Nick ThompsonDesiderius Erasmus (1466?–1536) made big books from little things. A literary lapidary, he compiled proverbs, anecdote…
On Translation
October 31, 2017
October 3, 2017This poster was published in a special issue of Rocinante in 1971. The entire issue was dedicated to Valdivia on the second anniversary of her death.Click here to read five poems by Rita…
August 29, 2017Ekin Oklap discusses her personal journey to becoming a translator and provides some insight into her experiences with translating her current project, Orhan Pamuk’s The Red-Haired W…
August 22, 2017Photo by Jonathan ArmstrongTranslator Allison Markin Powell discusses her most recent project, The Nakano Thrift Shop, and provides some insight into her approach to the…
August 15, 2017moomin goat, “Goat Bells,” April 9, 2007Click here to read Sneeden’s translations of four of Giannisi’s poems. Phoebe Giannisi is one of Greece’s foremost contemporary poets and…
July 25, 2017The only task FitzGerald finished and published in his lifetime was his marvelous rendering of the Rubaiyat of the Persian poet Omar Khayyam, with whom he felt a curiously close affinity across a…
July 18, 2017Mathias Énard’s Compass (New Directions, 2017) is not only a love letter to the field of orientalism but, more broadly, to the power of the written word itself, especially in translation. I b…
July 11, 2017The dog days of summer are upon us, and there’s no better way to pass through the longer days than curling up with a book in the shade. If you’re looking for some words to keep you company, there are…
June 27, 2017Robert Creeley (1972) / Photo by Elsa DorfmanIn April, following the death of Yevgeny Yevtushenko, I was digging through a wicker chest with old papers, looking at a colleague’s request for a few lett…
June 20, 2017Six years after its initial French publication, Luis de Miranda’s novella Who Killed the Poet? (Qui a tué le poète?) is being translated into English and multiple other languages…
June 6, 2017Starling murmuration. Photo by Airwolfhound/FlickrFive years after meeting at the Literary Translation Summer School run by the British Centre for Literary Translation, translators Morgan Giles, R…
May 30, 2017Drawing by Lea Goldberg / Courtesy of Tuvia RuebnerLea Goldberg (1911–1970), preeminent, versatile, and prolific writer of modern Hebrew letters, produced in her lifetime poetry that was characterized…
May 16, 2017Click here to read three poems by Joanna Pollakówna, never before translated into English.Joanna Pollakówna / Courtesy of Alice-Catherine CarlsJoanna Pollakówna (1939–2002) authored poems, bo…
February 27, 2017Eybers’s poem “Taalles” (Language Lesson) on the wall of the Anne Frank School in Leiden / Source: WikimediaWhether by personal predilection or because of powers beyond their control, poets are s…
February 21, 2017Bunches and Bits {Karina}, “Sepia,” November 2009 T. S. Eliot, in 1928, famously called Ezra Pound “the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time.”1 Eliot was referring to Pound’s renditions of fourt…
January 31, 2017Still from the Netflix adaptation of The Little Prince (2015), directed by Mark OsbornTranslating Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince is a difficult task, for this beloved n…
January 10, 2017Neo-Assyrian clay tablet. Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet 11: Story of the Flood. Known as the "Flood Tablet." BabelStone/Wikimedia Is it realistic to anticipate the eventual discover…
January 3, 2017orvalrochefort, “lost in translation,” May 31, 2008Although the author still believes in translation as the most satisfying way “to inscribe himself on the indifferent surface of the earth,” the p…
October 4, 2016George Hart, Orb, 24x24x24 inches, laser-cut wood, 2014. According to Hart, these sixty identical laser-cut and laser-etched wood components illustrate chiral icosahedral symmetry (courtesy:…
August 30, 2016On the Mexico City subway (2016) / Still from a film by Carolina RuedaUniversidad–Indios Verdesby Arturo Gutiérrez Plaza¿Para qué forzar los sueños y las pesadillassi aquí todo convulsiona ha…
August 16, 2016Noemi JaffeWhat Are the Blind Men Dreaming?Trans. Julia Sanches & Ellen Elias-BursacDeep VellumReflecting the horrors and historical significance of the Holocaust, three generations of wo…
May 10, 2016Deborah Kass’s OY / YO sculpture in Brooklyn Bridge Park. Photo by DUMBOID, March 4, 2016. Whenever I start to translate a Yiddish poem, I worry about capitalization. As in a lot…
May 3, 2016Juan José SaerThe CloudsTrans. Hilary Vaughn DobelOpen Letter Doctor Real’s manuscript, located on a computer disk found by Pichón Garay, describes his trip with five mental patients to…
March 15, 2016vk-red, “Somewhere over the rain with no bow,” 2015Fuchsia Branch in the Windby Judita VaičiūnaitėI block the sea’s wind from the branch.My black umbrella shelters it from rain.Its blossom’s…
January 26, 2016Queen Victoria’s long reign (1837–1901) was a prolific time for British novelists. The Brontë sisters, Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and Thomas Ha…
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