Translating poetry is impossible in the sense that prose works can be translated (not to speak of the translation of nonliterary texts). But re-creating poetry in a different language is always possi...

Seth Michelson / Courtesy of Washington & Lee University In October 2017 nonprofit press Settlement House released Dreaming America: Voices of Undocumented Youth in Maximum-Security Detention...

Liu Xiaobo, 1991 / Courtesy of Wang Ya Translator’s note: This photo of Liu Xiaobo swimming surfaced on the Internet after the sea burial in Dalian, China. Those of us who were hear...

John, “Fallen Angel,” August 29, 2010   Here and Now Here he is sitting across from the balcony door;the wind will blow – a wound. The rustling lightblushes and fades in the rectangular mirror – th...

moomin goat, “Goat Bells,” April 9, 2007 Click here to read Sneeden’s translations of four of Giannisi’s poems.  Phoebe Giannisi is one of Greece’s foremost contemporary poets and i...

Mathias 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...

Robert Creeley (1972) / Photo by Elsa Dorfman In 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 le...

Starling murmuration. Photo by Airwolfhound/Flickr Five years after meeting at the Literary Translation Summer School run by the British Centre for Literary Translation, translators Morgan Giles,...

Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase (1912), oil on canvas, 147 × 89.2 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art / The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950 Desnudo bajando una escalera...

Giovanni Bellini, Pietà (1505), oil on wood, 65 x 90 cm, Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice For more on the poetry of Pollakówna, read “A Terrible Ecstasy,” a companion essay by Alice-Cathe...

Attar’s The Conference of the Birds, just released in a new translation, is a deeply meaningful and spiritual work, delightfully packed with lively banter, pathos, clever hyperbole, cheek...