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?
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?”
Review by Wally Swist
The anecdote of Joseph Campbell’s seems apt regarding my carrying Art Beck’s Etudes: A Rilke Recital in my shoulder bag for some months, especially this second winter of Coronavirus, with Art Beck’s Rilke translations acting as a beneficent constellation of guiding stars.
Review by Art Beck
Other Shepherds is an unusual sequence that alternates translated Marina Tsvetaeva poems with poems by the translator. It appears as part of the Poets and Traitors Press series which “seeks to showcase authors who travel between writing and translation” and “views translation as forming part of a continuum with the creative writer’s work.”
Review by Wally Swist
I first came across the poetry of Art Beck while working as a cataloguer in an all-poetry bookstore in 1977. Hugh Miller, Bookseller was located on Crown Street in New Haven.
Review by Art Beck
I like this book a lot. In large part because it addresses a need for a substantial, “curated” selection from the some four hundred poems Rilke wrote in French in the last years of his life.
Among my many favorite books of poetry in translation, including W. S. Merwin’s translation of Pablo Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, Robert Bly’s translation of the “first modern Norwegian poet,” Rolf Jacobsen’s The Roads Have Come to an End Now, and Edmund Keeley’s and Philip Sherrard’s translation of C. P. Cavafy’s Collected Poems, there is a new addition: Art Beck’s translation of the Roman poet Martial (40 A.D.-104 A.D.) in a unique and refreshing selection just published by Shearsman Books, in England.
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.
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.
By Art Beck
I. For the Love of God, Jerome?
Somewhere on the internet—I’m ashamed to say I’ve forgotten where or whose poem it was—I came across a poem that began with a Latin epigraph: Amor ordinem nescit.
Art Beck (reviews of Vicente Aleixandre and Pierre Michon) and Arturo Mantecón will present their translations of the works of the Latin poets Luxorius and Catullus, as well as the works of Leopoldo María Panero and Francisco Ferrer Lerín, on Thursday, May 29, 6:30...
By Art Beck
Despite being a 1977 Nobel Laureate, Vicente Aleixandre (1898-1984) remains relatively sparsely translated into English. There are several small selections translated by Willis Barnstone, Stephen Kessler, and others, published in the ‘80s and ‘90s, but these appear mostly out of print.
By Art Beck
Pierre Michon, born 1945, won the Prix France Culture award in 1984 for his first book, a memoir of sorts, Vies Minuscules. In 2008, an English version, under the title Small Lives, was published by Archipelago Books with partial sponsorship of the French Ministry of Culture. Its translators, Jody Gladding and Elizabeth Deshays, were awarded the prestigious French American Foundation translation prize in 2009.