Poem-a-Day - "We travel carrying our words"

August 16, 2023

Women in Translation Month

“Basanta Panchami” by Pankajini Basu
translated by Lilian M. Whitehouse
“Love Opened a Mortal Wound” by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
translated by Joan Larkin and Jaime Manrique
“From Barrio Obrero to La Quince” by Nicole Cecilia Delgado
translated by Urayoán Noel
“[The flowers and my love,]” by Ono no Komachi
translated by Yone Noguchi
“Afroinsularity” by Conceição Lima
translated by Shook
“I Sing What You Loved” by Gabriela Mistral
translated by Ursula K. Le Guin
“Entonces Mi Hija/ Then My Daughter” by Mara Pastor
translated by María José Giménez and Anna Rosenwong
“Mist” by Lola Rodríguez de Tió
translated by Roderick Gill
“To the Pine Tree” by Jane Johnston Schoolcraft
translated by Margaret Noodin
“High Noon” by Liu Xia
translated by Ming Di and Jennifer Stern
“Carrying Our Words” by Ofelia Zepeda
translated by the poet

Marilyn Hacker on Translation

How true should the translator be to the original when translating a poem into another language? Marilyn Hacker explores this question, among others, in this conversation. Recorded at Poets Forum 2014 as part of our Chancellors Conversations, a series of intimate talks during which the Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets examine issues central to poetry today.

“In the era of permanent wars, those of us who cannot, or choose not to, look away, confront a flood of images, faces, and figures, most of which disappear into the black holes of history. Those that do not are repackaged and rebranded by triumphalist narratives. The sequence poem is a space that allows the poetic ‘I’ to stand before the ruins of time and history and to try to salvage the shards.”

Read our latest enjambments interview with Sinan Antoon on Postcards from the Underworld, published this month through Seagull Books. Read more about Antoon, including a selection of poems from the book, on Poets.org:

“Letter to al-Mutanabbi”
“Dismemberment”
“Autumn in Heaven”

more at poets.org

“I’d like us to head towards Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s ‘Conjure’ because it enacts language’s really terrific capacity as a shapeshifter, a trickster, an illusionist who opens us to real uncertainties of historical moments, which in Rachel’s poem includes the everyday.”

Divya Victor, this month’s Poem-a-Day Guest Editor, is the author of Curb (Nightboat Books, 2021), winner of the 2022 PEN/Open Book Award and the winner of the 2022 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. The collection was also a finalist for the 2022 CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry. Read and listen to a Q&A with Victor about her Poem-a-Day curatorial approach.

more at poets.org

Watch CAConrad read Jack Spicer’s poem “For Mac” as part of the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation's Read By series of poetry films.

#PoetryNearYou Pick of the Week

Anaïs Duplan presents Decolonizing Your Creative Voice, a two-part online workshop that will ask participants to identify their own ethics and values, interrogating how they do/not align with dominant ideals, in order to more mindfully approach their work and loosen any tendencies to conform. Sunday, August 20, and Sunday, August 27, from 2 to 6 p.m. ET. Register here. (Sponsored)

2024 First Book Award

Manuscript submissions for the 2024 Academy of American Poets First Book Award, judged by Victoria Chang, will be accepted online until September 1, 2023. The winner of the First Book Award will receive $5,000, publication by Graywolf Press, a six-week residency at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Umbria, Italy, and distribution of their winning book to thousands of Academy members.

more at poets.org

AWP is seeking a full-time copyeditor.
Graywolf Press is seeking a full-time marketing and sales associate or marketing and sales manager.
Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, is seeking a full-time assistant professor of English language & literature.
The Jan Michalski Foundation is accepting applications for its 2024 residencies. Apply by September 14. Learn more here.

Revisit last week’s Poem-a-Day selections with us on Poets.org:

August 6: “Skull Song” by Genevieve Taggard
August 7: “Names for Hunger” by Mrigaa Sethi
August 8: “Ewako” by Tanya Lukin Linklater
August 9: “A Bartable Enya Afternoon” by Lindsey Boldt
August 10: “Fragments on Naturalization” by Snigdha Koirala
August 11: “Standing Dead” by Andrea Abi-Karam
August 12: “Rhythms (Section I)” by Charles Reznikoff

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Poem-a-Day - "We travel carrying our words"

Marilyn Hacker on Translation

Older messages

"Garden Variety with Lesbians" by Serena Chopra

"Pottu / Dot" by Shivram Gopinath

"Fragments on Naturalization" by Snigdha Koirala

Poems and Lesson Plans for Back to School

"Standing Dead" by Andrea Abi-Karam

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