BOA Blog

[caption id="attachment_323" align="alignleft" width="200" caption="The Clean Shirt of It. Poems by Paulo Henriques Britto, translated by Idra Novey."][/caption] Thanks to Idra Novey for this next installment of her guest blog series on poetry and translation! Five Poetry Translation Myths and Five Splendid Quotes to Counter Them For this week’s post on poetry translation, I thought it might be fun to pair some of the most persistent myths about translation with some quotes from my favorite writers and translators and see what they had to say to each other. Here are the results: Myth Number Five: Translation is a passive undertaking....

[caption id="attachment_228" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Goethe"][/caption] On Poetry Translation, Health Care, and Conversations with the Visionary and Deceased Have you seen a review of poetry in translation in a major newspaper lately? I haven’t either. Apparently, American aren’t interested in poetry from the rest of the world until the poet is old and bald or wins a Nobel Prize, but I wonder if that’s true. People love reading about the infra-realists in Bolano’s novels from an older Mexico City poetry scene. Isn’t it possible they’d also be interested in hearing about current poetry movements in China and Mexico, movements that reflect...

[caption id="attachment_197" align="alignleft" width="225" caption="Idra Novey. BOA translator."][/caption] We're pleased to introduce our first guest blogger: Idra Novey! Idra translated The Clean Shirt of It by Paulo Henriques Britto. The Clean Shirt of It is the first English translation of a full-length poetry title by acclaimed Brazilian poet Paulo Henriques Britto. The book was published in a bilingual edition of English and Portuguese. As Idra wrote in her translator's introduction, "No other contemporary Brazilian poets write like Britto. At least not with such a keen sense of the relationship between form and content, or pop culture and high art. However,...