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Despite our attempts to capture the body with language and understand it as a unified whole that is closed off and divided against the world, we are not whole, nor are we closed.
Hannah didn’t realize her father was a person who needed to be married, like a philopatric sea animal, until after the divorce. “He’s a nurse shark,” her mother explained. “No matter what, they always go back to the Dry Tortugas.” Hannah didn’t know what her mother meant, but she suspected her father now preferred his…
I draw you out, faint voice, from rippled pages: a famished angler reeling in a fish, the kind that, in the folktale, grants a wish— a golden thing, imbued with living magic. Between us is the taut line of attention, imperiled by the current and the wind. Slowly but willfully, I reel you in….
David Karashima’s new book lays bare the invisible structures that support the international career of someone like Murakami: the multiple translators, editors, and publicists that take his work and create it into the product that Western readers then consume.
Kathy Acker’s infamous novel includes a section titled “The Persian Poems,” which pairs words written in Farsi alongside their translations in English. What has largely gone unrecognized is that Acker has deliberately mistranslated specific words, bringing an entirely new meaning to this passage, Acker’s craft, and the reader’s internalization of power.
Francisco’s newest book, presented simultaneously in English and Spanish, is that of a young poet matured, leaning into the naturalist observations present in his previous work and writing haiku with the precision and wisdom of a sure-handed veteran—while infusing them with a trademark sardonic wit.
We misunderstand each other and we pull away. Even within one language like English, words mean different things to different people, and we gravitate towards those who use this meaning-making technology as we do. Some people struggle to differentiate between systemic issues and issues of personality. The quest for a purer communication continues.
Over the past decade or so, Erín Moure has become just as well-known for her translation work as for her own writing. She has published sixteen books of poetry, a book of essays, and has translated fifteen volumes of poetry from French, Spanish, Galician, and Portuguese.
My first encounter with Seferis was through a bilingual edition of his work translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Until I read Seferis’s work, I hadn’t known Greek could be so beautiful, moving, and meaningful, even though I didn’t understand all of it at the time.
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