A Column on Translation

Paraphrasis

Paraphrasis is the column in which writers are invited to join the modest but arcane craft of the translator by engaging with poetry, prose, visual arts or music. Here (as T.S. Eliot observes when speaking about Pound's translations of Sextus Propertius) the reader who is a classical scholar "will wonder why this does not conform to his notions of what translation should be. It is not a translation, it is a paraphrase".

Playlist inspired by the stimulus

Bulmenia by Juan Arabia

Nacho Oliden

Arabia is configured in this monological song through the trade that has fallen to him, the craft that leads him to a...

Two poems by Aleksandra Byrska

Mark Tardi

There’s vocabulary, and then there’s vocabulary. A word you can look at in your native tongue and think, “Huh? ...

Earth for Me is Sky: Poems by Agi Mishol

Joanna Chen

‍Reading Agi Mishol’s poetry is like going for a walk on a well-trodden path and finding something new and surprising...

The Puzzle of "Mimic Language"

Eponine Howarth and Yara Bazzoun

In the original version of “Encounter in the forest”, the French-speaking reader manages to understand that a horrible..

Lacul by Mihai Eminescu

Andreea Iulia Scridon

Romania’s national poet, Mihai Eminescu (1850 – 1889), is the prototype of the Romantic poet: thematically comparable...

Four lines by Paul Celan

Dan Bellm

I began with one short, circumscribed, parenthetical, untitled poem, in a language I didn’t know, a spark of encounter..

Five poems by Omar Lara

Jessica Sequeira

The poet Omar Lara (1941 – 2021) was a vital referent in contemporary Chilean poetry. I have translated a few of...

Anniversary Snow by Yang Lian

Brian Holton

Chinese, like English, is an analytic SVO language (man bites dog/dog bites man), although nouns don’t decline, verbs do

The Poah Li’ul Famly by Giuseppe Gioachino Belli

Zoe Fairtlough

The Italian poet Giuseppe Gioachino Belli (1791-1863) wrote thousands of sonnets about Rome during the Risorgimento...

The clock has just struck midi: five poems by Mario Scalesi

Carlo Massimo

There was a time when, in the Sicilian port of Trapani, a crowd would gather at the docks once or even twice a week...

To Awaken from Despair: Translating Hamid Adib

Mahdi Ganjavi

I have long been mesmerized by the varied social settings and contexts in which classical Persian poetry is reproduced..

Poems by Morgenstern

Clifford Venho

In selecting and arranging this series of poems by Christian Morgenstern, my intention was to create for the reader...

Poems by Bronka Nowicka

Katarzyna Szuster-Tardi

The first thing about Bronka Nowicka’s work that resonated with me was her language, which seemed clean and effortless..

Poems by Julia Nemirovskaya

Boris Dralyuk

The art of translation, like any deeply engaged act of reading, is partly a matter of mirroring. We often see, in the...

Juicio by Juan Arabia

Patricio Ferrari

‘Juicio’ [Judgement]: first a noun, an act of assessment. Granted. But when we say judgement in poetry today, do we...

Precisely Your Turn by Alberto Moravia

Zoe Fairtlough

Alberto Moravia, one of Italy’s most famous literary figures, is renowned for his neorealist and anti-fascist novels...

Sissy Zhong by Yan Ge

Nicky Harman

Yan Ge has always taken her inspiration from the town where she grew up, but she uses that backdrop in very different...

The Drover by Atahualpa Yupanqui

Antonio Melloni

If we should, with Miguel de Unamuno, focus our attention in poets “that more profoundly belong to their country...

Poems by Katarzyna Szaulińska

Mark Tardi

My first encounter with the work of Katarzyna Szaulińska was through her poem “dorothy vallens”, which jolted me with...

After the Show by Anton Chekhov

Kotryna Garanasvili

Despite demonstrating Anton Chekhov’s writing at its finest, the story is little researched and largely overlooked...

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