Leading Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan and fellow award-winning poet and translator Fady Joudah are scheduled to visit 15 U.S. venues during October in support of Joudah’s critically acclaimed translation of Zaqtan’s work Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me, and Other Poems. Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me, and
Every good translator (and appreciator of international literature) knows that a work in translation carries more than the weight of a language’s technical nuances and abnormalities. Like an immigrant to a new nation, it grapples in a no man’s land between the culture in which it was born and the
Earlier this year, the publication of Yves Bonnefoy‘s Second Simplicity: New Poetry and Prose, 1991-2011, translated from the French by Hoyt Rogers, brought the French poet’s latest writings to an audience of English readers. Included in this translation were two unpublished fantasias on Hamlet— each a succinct tour de force that vividly
In January 1916, Gabriele D’Annunzio was flying a dangerous propaganda mission as a fighter pilot in the First World War when his plane was shot down by enemy fire. Suffering extreme pain from a detached retina in his right eye, the eminent Italian poet and political activist was forced to
Norman Manea is one of the world’s foremost contemporary writers on émigré life and the many nuances of political, cultural, and personal reality it engenders. While his moving prose has the unmistakable mark of creative excellence, it is also marked by his personal experience. Manea is a survivor of Holocaust
Yves Bonnefoy, often acknowledged as France’s greatest contemporary poet, turns 89 today. Earlier this year, the publication of Second Simplicity: New Poetry and Prose, 1991-2011, translated from the French by Hoyt Rogers, exposed Bonnefoy‘s latest writings to an audience of English readers. Included in the volume are two unpublished fantasias
It would be no exaggeration to say that Romanian novelist Norman Manea is one of the most celebrated contemporary Eastern European writers in the Western literary world. His impressive collection of cultural and literary awards currently includes the MacArthur Fellowship (U.S.), the Nonino International Literary Prize (Italy), the Prix Médicis
Margaret Sayers Peden, translator of Fernando de Rojas’ fifteenth-century classic La Celestina, among dozens of other books, considers here the joys and pleasures, challenges and frustrations of literary translation. Often regarded as the first European novel and second only to Don Quixote in its importance to Spanish literature, Celestina is
Fady Joudah first became associated with Yale University Press in 2007 when he was awarded the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize by then-judge Louise Glück, and the subsequent publication of his first volume of poetry, The Earth in the Attic, in April 2008. He returns to our list this
Marcel Proust said: “The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes, in seeing the universe with the eyes of another, of hundreds of others, in seeing the hundreds of universes that each of them sees.” The Margellos World Republic of Letters