October 1, 2024

Lucina Schell on “Sangre” by Mercedes Roffé

The Argentine poet Mercedes Roffé is known for her ekphrastic poetry and her engagement with a wide range of different artistic traditions, from visual art to music and literature. Her 2016 book Diario ínfimo (Mere diary), excerpted in Constellation, is...

September 19, 2024

Jenny Burton on Translating an Excerpt from Ansilta Grizas’s Un temporal

An excerpt of the Ansilta Grizas’s 103-page memoir Un temporal, originally published in Spanish by Ed. Entropía, was included in the anthology titled Constellation: Latin American Voices in Translation, recently published by Sundial House, a distribution partner of Columbia University...

September 6, 2024

Tiffany Troy on Translating Santiago Acosta

As a literary critic, I often begin my interviews with: “What is the act of literary translation to you?” Translators often respond with some version of the sentiment that translation is an act of radical activism. That is all well...

April 23, 2024

Roque Raquel Salas Rivera on Translating The Book of Conjurations

Poetry, like alchemy, can promise a material wealth it never quite delivers, transmutation through words, and the power to turn paupers into patrons, but most often promises an alchemy of the soul that strives toward a higher form. Irizelma Robles...

April 11, 2024

Matthew Fraleigh on The Same Moon Shines on All

The last few decades have been a time of great change for the field of Japanese literary studies. The scope of the category “Japanese literature” is very differently conceptualized than it was just a generation ago; it now embraces a...

April 9, 2024

Jonathan Chaves on Yanagawa Seigan

Perhaps the largest body of great poetry in the world as yet undiscovered is the verse composed by Japanese authors not in Japanese, but in literary Chinese (C., wenyan; J., bungen). The phenomenon of great literature written in a language...

April 2, 2024

André Colomer, the Action of the Arts, and the Importance of Poetry

Oskar De Wolf

– An individualist anarchist? To the uninitiated, it may appear somewhat peculiar that an individualist anarchist is a part of poetry month at the Columbia University Press blog. Anarchism has a well-earned reputation for being a little cold, a little...