The Poetry Translation Centre pairs living poets from Asia, Africa and Latin America with English-language translators and then puts the resulting translations online. You can browse the poetry by
country,
language,
translator or
poet. Besides the
hundreds of individual poems, all presented in the original and both literal and poetic translations, many have been recorded in dual readings by translator and poet, and put online as videos or mp3s (look for the microphone or camera icon). There are also
podcasts to download,
articles to read, and
chapbooks to purchase. It is absurd to single out a few poems as favorites, but nonetheless, here are a few that struck me hard,
Birds by
Kajal Ahmad, translated by
Mimi Khalvati,
Cataclysm and Songs by
Conceição Lima, translated in a
workshop, and
Survivors by
Choe Young-mi, translated by
Kyoo Lee and
Sarah Maguire (who is the founder and director of the Poetry Translation Centre). If these poems do not hit you, no need to worry as there are literally
hundreds more to read.
[via The Guardian]
posted by Kattullus
on Jan 2, 2013 -
5 comments
With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else. December 2012 marks the 40th anniversary of
Invisible Cities -- the sublime metaphysical travelogue by author-journalist
Italo Calvino. In a series of pensive dialogues with jaded emperor
Kublai Khan, the explorer
Marco Polo describes a meandering litany of visionary and impossible places,
dozens of surreal, fantastical cities, each poetically reifying ideas vital to language, philosophy, and the human spirit. This gracefully written love letter to urban life has inspired
countless tributes, but it's just the most accessible of Calvino's fascinating literary catalogue. Look inside for a closer look at his most remarkable works, links to English translations of his magical prose, and collections of artistic interpretations from around the web -- including
this treasure trove of essays, excerpts, articles, and recommended reading.
[more inside]
posted by Rhaomi
on Dec 30, 2012 -
26 comments
BEOWULF: A new translation Many modern Beowulf translations, while excellent in their own ways, suffer from what Kathleen Biddick might call “melancholy” for an oral and aural way of poetic making… The sense of loss or nostalgia for the old form seems a necessary and ever-present shadow over modern Beowulfs. What happens, however, when a contemporary poet, quite simply, doesn’t bother with any such nostalgia? Michael Davidson: "Tom Meyer’s Beowulf reenacts the dark grandeur of a poem that is as much a story of vengeance as it is of courage and loyalty. Meyer brings the poem’s alliterative, inflected line in concert with post-Poundian lineation to give the reader a vivid sense of our oldest poem’s modernity." Free download from independent publisher Punctum Books.
[more inside]
posted by the mad poster!
on Aug 25, 2012 -
47 comments
Brindin Press has lots of poetry translations into English online, concentrating on
French,
German,
Italian and
Spanish, though
more than 40 other languages are represented as well. A
boatload of translators is represented, from those toiling in obscurity to big literary names (e.g. there are translations of Catullus poems by
Ben Jonson,
Jonathan Swift,
Louis Zukofsky,
Aubrey Beardsley and
Thomas Hardy). There is also a
section of quirky poems. Finally,
here's a rendition of Goethe's Der Erlkönig that substitutes the elfish king with a dalek.
posted by Kattullus
on Sep 27, 2009 -
4 comments
[Ezra Pound] worked on and for poetry as others might work on a major scientific discovery or a drawn-out military mission. Thus, as Sieburth reminds us in his introduction to The Pisan Cantos, when, on May 3, 1945, Pound was arrested at his home in the hills above Rapallo, he immediately put a small Chinese dictionary and a copy of the Confucian classics in his pocket. Working as he then was on his Confucian translations, he knew that, wherever the military police were taking him, he would need these books.
From
Pound Ascendant by Marjorie Perloff. Ezra Pound's ability as a translator of Chinese poetry has long been disparaged by sinologists, such as George A. Kennedy in
Fenollosa, Pound and the Chinese Character. Other academics have sought to defend him. Two examples are Zhaoming Qian's
Ezra Pound's encounter with Wang Wei: toward the "ideogrammic method" of the Cantos and Stephen Tapscott's
In Praise of Bad Translations: Ezra Pound and the Cultural Work of Translation (pdf). Eric Hayot draws the contours of this long-running debate and explores its significance in
Critical Dreams: Orientalism, Modernism, and the Meaning of Pound's China. Pound's
Cathay in full and a public domain
audiobook version (iTunes link).
posted by Kattullus
on Apr 30, 2009 -
16 comments
Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl is an Icelandic poet. He
translates Icelandic poetry into English (I particularly like his versions of Sigfús Daðason), and he has an interesting
interview on Icelandic poetry ("Curiously enough, back in the days the nationalists would sometimes write in danish. And writing in a foreign language was more or less seen as the only alternative to literature being a mere hobby until Halldór Laxness came along"). But really this is an elaborate excuse to post a link to
Höpöhöpö Böks: Köld öld Böks mjög örg, Ölböl örlög Böks! (Warning: My wife thought the linked video sounded like vomiting.) Via
wood s lot.
This one goes out to my man Kattullus; hope you can stick around! [more inside]
posted by languagehat
on Feb 17, 2009 -
12 comments
Sean Bonney's translations of Baudelaire are unconventional. Instead of following the form of the French originals they are semi-concrete typewriter poetry. In a
review of the book,
everyone's cup of tea, onedit magazine says that they are "certainly the best translations of Baudelaire in English ever written." Which might explain why they published 35 of them in their latest issue. You can listen to Bonney read his translations
here [mp3]
posted by Kattullus
on Jul 18, 2007 -
61 comments
Can't hack Catullus in
Latin? How about
Brazilian Portuguese,
Catalan,
Chinese,
Danish,
Dutch,
English,
Estonian,
French,
German,
Hungarian,
Irish,
Italian,
Japanese,
Norwegian,
Polish,
Portuguese,
Rioplatense,
Romanian,
Russian,
Scanned,
Serbian,
South African,
Spanish,
Swedish, or
Welsh? You can also compare two languages side by side.
posted by kenko
on Apr 11, 2005 -
15 comments
Poetry International Web opens today. "Hundreds of poems by acclaimed modern poets from all around the world, both in the original language and in English translation."
posted by igor.boog
on Nov 6, 2002 -
7 comments
