Poetry in Translation

This article from The Japan Times online asks the question "is poetry translatable?" Author Roger Pulvers takes a line from the famous Japanese poem, "Ame ni mo makezu" by Kenji Miyazawa, which is known to virtually all Japanese, and explains the difficulties of translating the line into English.

To read three poems by Shamim Azad, translated from the Bengali by Carolyne Wright and Syed Islam Manzoorul, see HFR's website for issue #42. The poems also appear in their original Bengali, and are introduced by Wright's essay on collaborative translation. You can also listen to Shamim Azad read them. Check all of that out here.

If you're interested in works of translation (we hope you are!), issue #42 also features Polina Barskova's poems translated from the Russian by Ilya Kaminsky, Vicky Allyon's poems translated from the Spanish by Ming Holden, Sylva Fischerova's poems translated from the Czech by Stuart Friebert, and Angele Kingué 's story translated from the French by Renée Gosson. Our upcoming issue, #43, will feature work translated from German, Gaelic, French, Spanish and Japanese. To order a copy of either issue, please email me at HFR@asu.edu.