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...