Christopher Bakken is a graduate of the writing programs at Columbia University and University of Houston. His first book, After Greece, won the 2001 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. His new poems (from a manuscript of eclogues and elegies) have appeared recently or are forthcoming in The Paris Review, Raritan, Southwest Review, Gettysburg Review, Western Humanities Review, The Atlanta Review, and Lyric. <back to translation>
Giuseppe Belli (1791-1863) wrote thousands of sonnets in the Roman dialect, which portray 19th century Rome, especially the every-day lives of the common people. <back to translation>
Steve Bradbury
is Associate Professor of English at National Central University in Taiwan and
a member of the American Literary Translators Association. His poems, translations,
and essays have appeared in boundary 2, Jacket, Parnassus,
Raritan, and elsewhere. He has two volumes of poetry in translation:
Fusion Kitsch: Poems from the Chinese of Hsia Yü (Zephyr Press,
2001) and Poems from the Prison Diary of Ho Chi Minh (Tinfish Press,
2003). <back to translation>
Mercedes Cebrián was born in Madrid (Spain) and studied Communication at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. She got a two-year Residency Fellowship at the Residencia de Estudiantes de Madrid (www.residencia.csic.es). Her first book of short stories and poems, El malestar al alcance de todos, was published in 2004 by Caballo de Troya (Random House-Mondadori). Her texts have been published in the Spanish newspapers La Vanguardia and El Pais, and in the literary magazines Turia, Clarín and Sin Embargo. E-mail: mercedescebrian@yahoo.es <back to translation>
Du Fu (712-770) is one of the greatest poets of the Chinese classical verse tradition. His poetry has been rendered into English many times over the last century or so but rarely in a manner that reflects the grace and power with which this influential Tang poet wrote within a formalist tradition. Each of the three poems translated here was composed in a different verse form, and the translations have been designed to reflect these formal differences. “To Bi Siyao” is a rhymed octave (wuyan lushi) written in 758 in the capital city of Chang'an shortly before the poet’s “banishment” to a minor post in the countryside, where he no doubt witnessed the impressment practices described in the rhymed ballad (xing) that follows. The last poem is a rhymed quatrain (qiyan jueju) believed to have been written shortly before the poet’s death. <back to translation>
David Lee Garrison teaches Spanish and Portuguese at Wright State University. His translations have appeared in various magazines and anthologies, and with Willis Barnstone he published A Bird of Paper: Poems of Vicente Aleixandre (Ohio University Press). His translations of José Bergamín, Echoes of a Distant Sea (Mellen Press), came out in 1991, and his most recent book is a translation of Pedro Salinas’s book Certain Chance (Bucknell University Press, 2000). <back to translation>
Danny Howard
on his photo: "I decided to go to Slovenia because I had found myself in
Trieste and
thought that the Balkans might be an interesting place to visit. The Budapest
train stopped and lingered for some time at the border, time for customs agents
and border guards to tour the train and inspect passports, and more time to
swap the engine that was pulling the train. We were leaving Italy, and entering
Slovenia, but I felt oddly at home because the landscape looked a lot like the
rolling hills of Wisconsin."
www.flickr.com/photos/dannyman/
Roula Konsolaki lives in Thebes, Greece. Shei is a graduate of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Philology and does free-lance translations for Lagouderas Press in Athens. She is also the translator of Christopher Bakken's first book, which will appear in a modern Greek edition next year in Athens. <back to translation>
Ingrid G. Lansford
grew up in a German family in Denmark and imigrated from Germany at age 18.
She entered graduate school on a Danforth Fellowship for Women and received
her Ph.D. in English from the University of Texas in 1988. After teaching English,
she worked as a freelance technical translator for ten years before concentrating
on literary translation. She has been a frequent contributor to the bilingual
journal DIMENSION2 and has also published in Words Without Borders
(January and March 2005). In 2004 she won the Leif and Inger Sjöberg Prize
of the American Scandinavian Foundation for her translation of seven of the
Love Stories From Many Lands by Danish author Meir Aron Goldschmidt.
<back to translation>
Titos Patrikios was born in Athens in 1928. Well known for his early leftist leanings during the Greek Civil War; during the first and second military dictatorships Patrikios was first “displaced” within his own borders (once on the island of Makronissos with Yiannis Ritsos and later on Ai-Stratis), then exiled outright to Paris and Rome, from 1959-1964 and again from 1967-1975. He is probably best known for the poems he wrote in those two cities, many of them addressed directly to the home country. After he received Greece's National Prize for Literature, Patrikios' numerous books were assembled by Kedros into a three-volume Collected Poems, and several new volumes have followed. Though widely known and published in Europe, Patrikios’ work remains virtually unknown in this country. Translations of Patrikios by Bakken and Konsolaki have appeared or are forthcoming in Modern Poetry in Translation, Seneca Review, The Atlanta Review, Tampa Review, and Two Lines. <back to translation>
Pedro Salinas (Spain, 1891-1951) was a professor at the Sorbonne as well as at the Universities of Seville, Murcia, and Madrid until the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), when he was forced into exile along with many other writers of his generation, which included among others Rafael Alberti, Vicente Aleixandre (Nobel Prize, 1977), Federico García Lorca, and Jorge Guillén. He published one collection of short stories and another of plays, a novel, seven volumes of essays and literary criticism, and nine books of poetry. <back to translation>
Jan Sonnergaard,
born 1963, has published three volumes of stories so far, all with Gyldendal:
Radiator (1997), Sidste Søndag I Oktober (The Last
Sunday in October, 2000) and Jeg Er Stadig Bange for Caspar Michael Petersen
(I'm Still Afraid of Caspar Michael Petersen, 2003). Radiator has been
translated into German and Italian. All three volumes were republished under
one cover as The Trilogy (Trilogien, 2004). The author has been the
recipient of five grants, among them the Harald Kiddes and Astrid Ehrencron-Kiddes
Grant for promising authors in 1997, and one from the Gyldendal Publishing Company
in 2000. He has won three prizes, the Freedom of Speech Foundation Prize in
2000, the LO (Federation of Trade Unions) Prize, also in 2000, and the Champagne
Prize of the Association of Danish Teachers' Trade School Division in 2002.
He is one of the best known contemporary fiction writers in Denmark.
<back to translation>
Ben Van Wyke was born in South Carolina and studied Spanish, Philosophy, and Third World Development at Calvin College in Michigan. He spent several years teaching English in Spain and is currently pursuing post-graduate studies in Comparative Literature and Translation Studies at SUNY Binghamton in New York. <back to translation>
Miller Williams is the author, editor, or translator of over thirty books, including fourteen volumes of poetry. Recognition for his work has included the Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship in Poetry from Harvard University, the Prix de Rome for Literature and the Academy Award for Literature, both from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Poets' Prize, the Charity Randall Citation for Contribution to Poetry as a Spoken Art from the International Poetry Forum, the John William Corrington Award for Excellence in Literature, honorary doctorates from Lander College and Hendrix College, and designation as a member of The Circle of Distinguished Citizens of the World by the Trilussa Center of Rome. He was inaugural poet for the second presidential inauguration of Bill Clinton. His Patterns of Poetry: An Encyclopedia of Forms is a standard in the field. A collection of essays on his work, Miller Williams and the Poetry of the Particular, edited by Michael Burns, is available from the University of Missouri Press. A multi-national board of the journal Visions International has named Williams one of the world's twenty best poets now writing in English, and his poems are included on a CD from Roth Publishing Company entitled Poetry of Our Time, featuring work by the world's 500 best poets of the twentieth century in all languages, as selected by an advisory board of teachers, librarians, and writers. The body of his best poetry over the years, gathered under the title Some Jazz A While: The Collected Poems, was recently released by the University of Illinois Press. <back to translation> <back to his notes on translating>
Programs
in Creative Writing and Translation ■ Department of English ■