Translating Apollinaire delves into Apollinaire’s poetry and poetics through the challenges and invitations it offers to the process of translation.Besides providing a new appraisal of Apollinaire, the most significant French poet of WWI, Translating Apollinaire aims to put the ordinary reader at the centre of the translational project. It proposes that translation’s primary task is to capture the responses of the reader to the poetic text, and to find ways of wri...

A new expanded edition of the classic study of translation, finally back in printThe difficulty (and necessity) of translation is concisely described in Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, a close reading of different translations of a single poem from the Tang Dynasty—from a transliteration to Kenneth Rexroth’s loose interpretation. As Octavio Paz writes in the afterword, “Eliot Weinberger’s commentary on the successive translations of Wang Wei’s little...

An illuminating look at the many forms of poetry's essential excellence by James Longenbach, a writer with "an ear as subtle and assured as any American poet now writing" (John Koethe)"This book proposes some of the virtues to which the next poem might aspire: boldness, change, compression, dilation, doubt, excess, inevitability, intimacy, otherness, particularity, restraint, shyness, surprise, and worldliness. The word ‘virtue' came to English from Latin, via Old ...

This collection of contemporary poetry is written in four languages: English, Urdu, Persian & Punjabi, with a stunning presentation of background images that compliment the poems. He writes the traditional Ghazal along with experimenting with other contemporary styles of poetic form. All poetry and photo paintings are created by Tahir Khan Arzani. Includes also a thoughtful introduction composed by Brenda Jane Sherburn. A phenomenal book that you will enjoy reading time and time again.

Written in the twelfth century, the Naisadhiyacarita (The Adventures of Nala, King of Nisadha) is a seminal Sanskrit poem beloved by South Asian literary communities for nearly a millennium. This volume introduces readers to the poem's author, his reading communities, the modes through which the poem has been read and used, the contexts through which it became canonical, its literary offspring, and the emotional power it still holds for the culture that values it....

This book by a well-known translator and critic is divided into two parts, the first dealing with the linguistic and other more technical aspects of translating poetry, the second involved with more practice-oriented matters. The chapters in Part One examine the specific constraints of language and the unavoidable linguistic bases of translation; the constraints of specific languages; forms and genres; and prosody and comparative prosody. Part Two looks at the subjective element in transla...

Translation as Transformation in Victorian Poetry illuminates the dynamic mutual influences of poetic and translation cultures in Victorian Britain, drawing on new materials, archival and periodical, to reveal the range of thinking about translation in the era. The results are a new account of Victorian translation and fresh readings both of canonical poems (including those by Browning and Tennyson) and of non-canonical poems (including those by Michael Field). Revealing Victorian poets to...

Rainer Maria Rilke is arguably the most important modern German-language poet. His New Poems, Duino Elegies, and Sonnets to Orpheus are pillars of 20th-century poetry. Yet his earlier verse is less known. The Bookof Hours, written in three bursts between 1899 and 1903, is Rilke's most formative work, covering a crucial period in his rapid ascent from fin-de-siècle epigone to distinctive modern voice. The poems document Rilke'stour of Russia with Lou Andr...

Gillian White argues that the poetry wars among critics and practitioners are shaped by “lyric shame”—an unspoken but pervasive embarrassment over what poetry is, should be, and fails to be. “Lyric” is less a specific genre than a way to project subjectivity onto poems—an idealized poem that is nowhere and yet everywhere.

The translation of poetry has always fascinated the theorists, as the chances of "replicating" in another language the one-off resonance of music, imagery, and truth values of a poem are vanishingly small. Translation is often envisaged as a matter of mapping over into the target language the surface features or semiotic structures of the source poem. Little wonder, then, that the vast majority of translations fail to be poetry in their own right. These essays focus on the poetically viabl...

Winner of the Anna Balakian Prize 2016Is poetry lost in translation, or is it perhaps the other way around? Is it found? Gained? Won? What happens when a poet decides to give his favorite Russian poems a new life in English? Are the new texts shadows, twins or doppelgangers of their originals-or are they something completely different? Does the poet resurrect himself from the death of the author by reinterpreting his own work in another language, or does he turn in...

There is great interest in recent scholarship in the study of metropolitan cultures in India as evident from the number of books that have appeared on cities such as Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata. Though Hyderabad has a rich archive of history scattered in many languages, very few attempts have been made to bring this scholarship together.The papers in this volume bring together this scholarship at one place. They trace the contribution of different languages and literary cult...