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How to Tell a True Origin Story of a Novel

By Nina Schuyler

“My novel is about a female mathematician, Virginia, who uses artificial intelligence to bring back her dead lover. The two anecdotes I just told you might seem like the origin story of my novel. If someone tells you an origin story like this, don’t believe it.”

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Hidden Mischief: Some Thoughts on Tate and Edson

By Robin Arble

“The mischief in Tate and Edson’s poems plays with form as much as content. Already bored with the subversion inherent in the ‘the prose poem’—an oxymoron, a floating stone—their poems straddle the line between verse and prose.”

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Notes on a Poem: Nathan McClain’s Labor Day: Brighton Beach

By Robin Arble

“Nathan is skeptical of the prose poem because he thinks, like many, but not all poets, that the line break is a fundamental element of successful poetry, and any poem that abandons the line break must replace it with something that succeeds in doing everything the line break does.”

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This Powerful Rhyme: A Helplessly Wandering Essay on a Willfully Meandering Poem

By Art Beck

In our neo-Orwellian world, is it adage, cliche’, or just hypothesis to say “the pen is mightier than the sword”? Does “the pen” equate with “the truth”? Or, since we’re talking about sword fights, aren’t the feints and parries of “alternative facts” every bit as much a weaponized pen as the sincerity of a straightforward lunge?

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I Really Hate You, Doctor Fell, But Love’s Funny That Way

By Art Beck

In October 2016, I was honored to be a panelist at the annual American Literary Translators Conference. The panel title was “Crossing the Line,” and the topic description was as follows: “What happens when a translation gets adopted as an original in its target culture?”

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Translating Ungaretti

By Wally Swist

I first read Giuseppe Ungaretti in translation in the early 1970s when I picked up his Selected Poems in the Penguin Modern European Poets Series translated by Patrick Creagh. As is my tradition, every autumn I return to a writer’s work that I prized when I was a young man.

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The Power of Three: Some Martial “Triptychs”

By Art Beck

The 1st Century Roman epigrammatist Martial left us some 1500 extant poems. Classical scholars will sometimes produce monographs on the complementary makeup of one or another of his volumes, but “poetic” translators generally make their selection across Martial’s entire works, often based on a particular translator’s sense of compatibility with various individual poems.

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Essay: How Not to Review a Translation

By Art Beck

Recently someone sent me a PEN America YouTube discussion on reviewing translations. The panelists were practicing translators, trade publishers, and reviewers from respected journals. It was, in many ways, a conversation on how to balance various interests.

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Letter from Singapore

By Ho Lin

In Asia, most cities jolt to life at night, and Singapore is no exception. For one thing, it’s usually too damn hot to do anything during the day, except hit one of the public pools (until the inevitable afternoon thunderstorm hits).

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On Light Noise as Translation

By Karen An-hwei Lee

Several years ago, a friend gave me a gift subscription to a magazine that sent, in turn, a sequence of maps—a bird migration map, a global warming map, a seas-of-the-world map, a night-sky atlas, and a map of the globe at night.

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Preface to S O S: Poems, 1961-2013 by Amiri Baraka

By Paul Vangelisti

S O S traces the almost sixty-year career of a writer who may be, along with Ezra Pound, one of the most important and least understood American poets of the past century. The selection attests to a life’s work that is both a body a poetry and a body of knowledge; passionate, often self-critical reflections on the culture and politics of his time.

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Letter from Paris

By Katy Masuga

Salut au monde! As expected this time of year and this time of evening and this place in the world, the sky is an incredible ivory blue and, yes, the clouds themselves are a luminescent pink strung across the vast yet controlled open space, encapsulated on the edges by centuries- and even millennia-old neighborhoods, like cotton candy pulled between sticky fingers or even just stretched cotton itself, in the way that it floats whimsically atop fields drifting with the breeze falling and rising and leaving parts of its body behind, spreading itself interminably among the numerous dark, dry stems and burnt, crackling leaves.

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Letter from Hong Kong

By Lucas Klein

Reviewing exiled Chinese poet Bei Dao’s first full-length collection The August Sleepwalker in English in 1990, a professor quipped, “These could just as easily be translations from a Slovak or an Estonian or a Philippine poet. It could even be a kind of American poetry….”

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Carta desde Montreal/Letter from Montreal

By Francisco García González, English translation by Mary G. Berg
Amigos, disculpen, pero escribir es menos original que lo que uno se imagina. Solo se trata de un acto de registro que unos hacen mejores que otros. Debe ser el talento. Tarde más de treinta años para darme cuenta que todos poseemos una mente literaria y que dicha cosa no para de generar narrativa. Eso es biología. Fascinante, además.

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Bind yourself to us with your impossible voice, your voice! sole soother of this vile despair.

—Arthur Rimbaud, “Phrases

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