September 26, 2023

Alejandro Álvarez Nieves on Translating Negras

A rendering born out of love. This project was a happy accident. Yolanda had just been selected for the prestigious Bogotá 39 list of Latin American authors with her first book, Ojo de Luna. While collaborating as curator for Mayra...

September 13, 2023

Translating the Kokinshū into a Standard Prosodic Form

Torquil Duthie

The Kokinshū was always meant to become a classic. The ambition of its compilers was to make waka (vernacular Japanese poetry) the preeminent literary practice of the Japanese imperial court. Yet surely even they would have been surprised by the...

December 6, 2021

Caitlin Hurst and Ada Smailbegović on Poetics of Liveliness (Part 2)

Today’s post continues our interview with Ada Smailbegović about her book Poetics of Liveliness. Read the first part of Smailbegović and Hurst’s conversation, where they discuss rhythm and materiality, the world held at the edge of a razor, and how...

December 1, 2021

Caitlin Hurst and Ada Smailbegović on Poetics of Liveliness (Part 1)

Ada Smailbegović’s new book Poetics of Liveliness investigates the ways twentieth- and twenty-first-century poets have intermingled scientific methodologies with poetic form to reveal unfolding processes of change. The book shifts across scales to describe the subtly changing realms of molecules,...

April 22, 2021

“You Aren’t the Center, but the Radius”

Irina Shevelenko on Maria Stepanova’s Kireevsky, with translations by Eugene Ostashevsky

“The chill of having no place […] is the only thing that gives poetry a chance not to participate in the parade of general achievements, not to wind up as a passkey that opens the doors for a third-party, external...

May 13, 2020

Columbia University Press Announces the 2020 Student Poetry Contest Winners!

April was National Poetry Month, and this year, it marked the fourth annual high school poetry contest, in which high school students are invited to submit an original poem inspired by one from the Granger’s database. The contest has grown...

April 24, 2020

Book Excerpt! Poetry Unbound, By Mike Chasar (introduction)

“By disclosing what are at once poetry’s most inscrutable and its most public aspects, Chasar reorients our understanding of poetry’s relation to the media, throwing gasoline on the fire of a question we have dodged for too long: what is...

April 23, 2020

Origin Stories

By Mike Chasar

“A persuasive, thoroughly researched, memorable, and often delightful book. Mike Chasar has excelled in his ambitious coverage of primary sources. Moreover, this is a book that addresses questions that come up frequently in the poetry world about where and why...

April 16, 2020

Book Excerpt! Make It the Same, by Jacob Edmond (introduction)

“With its revisionist echoes of Pound’s ‘make it new,’ Make It the Same is theoretically generative for thinking about modernist, contemporary, and world literature. Edmond powerfully demonstrates how the new media of repetition have generated a poetics of the same, a ‘copy...

April 15, 2020

Verse Versus Virus

By Jacob Edmond

“Make It the Same rebuts the notion that formal word-games are a decadent first-world hobby. It is an empirically broad, thoughtfully constructed, well-written, timely book about an important subject: a technical ‘mode of production’ prominent in contemporary poetry, with its...

August 7, 2019

Barbara Heldt on How Translation Can Give a Book a Second Life

“Karolina Pavlova’s 1848 novel made a splash when it first appeared, and for good reason. It is interesting in form, mixing prose and poetry, and full of sharply ironic insights about Russian society of the day, especially the lives of...

August 6, 2019

Joshua A. Fogel on Yosano Akiko’s Travels

Our celebration of women poets in translation continues today with a guest post by Joshua A. Fogel, who translated Yosano Akiko’s Travels in Manchuria and Mongolia: A Feminist Poet from Japan Encounters Prewar China. In 1928 at a highpoint of Sino-Japanese tensions,...