by E. Rowan
The American University at Cairo recently launched a Center for Translation Studies and as part of it, a series of seminars on literary translation. Awesome.
Categories: Uncategorized • Tags: Cairo, translation studies
by E. Rowan
I’m right now sitting in a cafe in Iowa City reading. There’s not much unusual about this situation. But I’ve finally managed to prioritize reading The Poetry Foundation’s recently released Poetry and New Media User’s Guide. The lovely 74-page pdf is split into two sections: Legal Issues and The Lifeline of Poetry. My husband, a new media and technology educator in Cambridge, MA, is sitting beside me (an unusual situation) reading the first section. I’m focusing on the second. What’s […]
Categories: Uncategorized • Tags: new media, Poetry Foundation, translation
by E. Rowan
First of all, kudos to Vogue for writing about poetry in translation. It gives me hope to know that a major fashion magazine will, occasionally, deign to engage with literature. Ok, that said, could they have actually gotten someone who knew a little more about poetry (or translation, for that matter) to write the 198 words on the book? With not much space devoted to it, I suppose I shouldn’t complain, but to open with the utterly absurd statement that […]
Categories: Uncategorized • Tags: poetry, translation, Vogue
by E. Rowan
I edit a lot of writing. I’m not often paid for it, or at least not very much, but it has given me the opportunity to develop a list of best practices. I’m sharing them today with the class I’m TAing, and thought I’d also put them up here. You know, for fun. These are cobbled together from previous writing instructors (thank you Neal Bruss for Advanced Composition, which changed my life as a writer), stolen blatantly from writing and […]
Categories: Uncategorized • Tags: grammer, tips, writing
by E. Rowan
Every now and then I get sucked into the internet and click through to some pretty amazing things. Occasionally I like to track them, for posterity or others who are interested in the same things I am. I began with Poetry International Web’s newest article on Colombian Poetry which reminded me that I’ve always wanted to go to the International Poetry Festival in Medellín and this year is their twentieth year. Sadly the dates are in direct conflict with something […]
Categories: Uncategorized • Tags: Issuu, Medellín International Poetry Festival, Poetry International Web, publishing, Rattapallax
by E. Rowan
Short and sweet: the podcast I’ve been working on with Chad Post of Open Letter Books for the past few months launched! The first episode which is available now is a conversation we had with Lawrence Venuti at MLA in December about his translations of Catalan poet Ernest Farrés’s book Edward Hopper (which I reviewed earlier for Three Percent). We also talked about publishing and poetry and some other great stuff. It’s available now through ITunes to listen and subscribe, […]
Categories: Uncategorized • Tags: Chad Post, Edward Hopper, Ernest Farres, Lawrence Venuti, podcast, poetry, Reading the World, review, Three Percent, translation
by E. Rowan
I’ve been recently very interested in translation from a language that you don’t know. Actually, this is far from a recent interest for me – its one of the ways I was initially introduced to literary translation as an art form. But only recently have I realized how controversial, how marginalized this practice can be in a practice that is already marginalized by creative writing and academia as institutions of cultural production. Ezra Pound, W.S. Merwin, Robert Lowell, Martha Collins, […]
Categories: Uncategorized • Tags: Blaz Lilienthall, Ch'ang Chien, Chinese, collaborative translation, Frodebart Winslow, K. Ripley, multiple simultaneous versions, poetry, translation
by E. Rowan
Reading today from On the Walls and in the Streets: American Poetry Broadsides from the 1960s by James D. Sullivan for my Printer as Publisher letterpress class, I came across a passage quoting Beatrice Warde’s essay on typographic design “The Crystal Goblet: or Printing Should Be Invisible.” It struck me suddenly that I am, and have always been, a practicioner of invisible arts. Or at least, I have enjoyed and hopefully excelled in the invisible rather than the visible arts. […]
Categories: Uncategorized
by E. Rowan
A good friend of mine who is dominicana and I have been talking a lot about translating a book or few from the DR together. She’s not a literature person, but she has the intimate knowledge (or access to it) of the literary landscape that I don’t have. I think this all started on a field trip to the stacks at Widener last year to scour the Latin American poetry section for Puerto Rican poetry. We found not that much […]
Categories: Uncategorized • Tags: Azul Editions, caribbean, Dominican Republic, poetry, Puerto Rico, translation
by E. Rowan
I’m sure someone out there knows the difference, but it’s not me. For a few years now, since translating a remarkable book of prose poems, I’ve been fascinated with the genre and it’s history. The excellent White Pine anthology The House of Your Dream has kept me occupied with prose poems from around the world and I’ve even begun experimenting with my own compositions in the form. In my list-of-classes-I-someday-want-to-teach (along with a class on the defense of poetry) is […]
Categories: Uncategorized • Tags: fiction, flash fiction, poetry, prose poetry, translation, White Pine, Words without Borders
E. Rowan Mena