TRANSLATIONS
3 Saafi Youssef Translations by Khaled Mattawa
Saafi Youssef (1934-2021) is considered one of the most important contemporary poets in the Arab world.
3 Christophe Tarkos Translations by Marty Hiatt
Christophe Tarkos (1963–2004) was born near Marseille and trained as a social science teacher before devoting himself to poetry in the early 1990s. His work placed the spoken word at the centre of poetry and he became well-known through his many powerful (semi-)improvised poetic performances, which would often be extensively re-worked in written form.
2 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Translations by Stuart Cooke
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-1695) was born in a Mexican village as Juana Inés de Asbaje y Ramírez. Bookish and precocious, she was taken to the viceroy’s court in Mexico City when she was still young; there she learned Latin and soon impressed scholars with her erudition. In 1669 she entered a Hieronymite convent—primarily, it seems, to avoid marriage and to be free to pursue her studies—and changed her name to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.
3 Self-Translations by Ouyang Yu
Characteristics of a Ceramic Artist Clay. A large chunk of it. You have to cut it with a thread. When you put it on, the wheel will keep turning underneath it. Whatever shapes of utensils you make, you have to …
3 Hélène Herault Translations by Liza Tripp
Clotilde She’s put on her flowered dress Seated alone, centre of the room, she hums Expecting nothing, nobody. Time’s contours have grown hazy Unless he was the one to abandon her? Yet just before, he left her flowers on a …
2 Vladimir Mayakovsky Translations by Paul Magee
Note The translation “the extraordinary thing that happened to vladimir mayakovsky one summer in a dacha” appears in the collection Later Unearthed, published by Puncher and Wattmann in 2025. the extraordinary thing that happened to vladimir mayakovsky one summer in …
3 Amelia Rosselli Translations by Roberta Antognini and Deborah Woodard
Courtesy of Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, New York, NY. Note These translations appear in the collection Document, published by World Poetry Press in April 2025. They are reproduced here with the publisher’s permission. I Flanking the empty tree the ants’ tents …
3 Ioana Vintilă Translations by Clara Burghelea
Photo by Cato Lein the origami bunker there is no difference between us and the exhausted drudges who no longer believe in anything they spoke to us of paradise with a peasant’s certainty that something might come of what they …
4 Liǔ Zōngyuán Translations by W. H. Chong
Image: Detail from “Snowscapes along Yangtze river (長江積雪圖)”, after Wang Wei OCCASIONAL POEM ON A SUMMER’S DAY The fierce heat of the south—deep drunken sleep, the north window open Silence at midday—but for a farmhand past the bamboo pounding tea …
3 Juan Carlos Mestre Translations by Peter Boyle
“Antepasados” was published in La casa roja (Calambur, 2008); “Epístola del Giotto” and “Color Chagall” in La bicicleta del Panadero (Calambur, 2012). The Spanish poems are reproduced with permission. The English translations are previously unpublished. ANCESTORS Where does my memory …
3 Judith Kiros Translations by Kira Josefsson
O was published by World Poetry Books in September 2024. The following excerpts are reproduced with the publisher’s permission.
4 Grzegorz Wróblewski Translations by Adam Zdrodowski and Ben Borek
The following translations were first published in March 2024 in the online chapbook The Life of a Tenement House. They are reproduced with permission from Half Day Moon Press.
3 Lu Jin Translations by Helen Jia
In oracle bone script, the character for “poetry” (詩) did not exist; ancient humans used “temple” (寺) to represent “poetry” (詩). If you split the character 詩 (poetry), it forms the phrase 寺之言, which means “the words of the temple”.
3 Julio Fabián Translations by Callum Methven
The following poems are from Julio Fabián’s 2022 poetry collection El viaje hacia Andrómeda (Fallidos Editores, Medellin). They are translated here into English for the first time.
7 Sei Shōnagon Translations by Pinyu Hwang
Punctuation has meaning. In contemporary written English, it is the commas and full stops, the dashes and hyphens, the colons, semicolons, that frame the context and the scope of words and phrases. Different types of pauses are denoted by different punctuation marks.
3 Mohsen Mohamed Translations by Sherine Elbanhawy
Mohsen’s poetry is very much ingrained in the tradition of poetry as a voice of resistance; his specificity to the Egyptian incarceration experience speaks to the broad themes of injustice, the harshness and the inhumanity of his time in prison, …
3 Petre Ioan Crețu Translations by Cristina Savin
Heatwave my city painted in green and yellow, pale yellow stained with the red of the sun then the news bulletin the weather all filtered through my hazel eye in the glass screens and diodes breaking news we strolled together …
Emerging Malay Poets: Translations of Zulfadli Rashid, Sofia Nin and Hidayat Nordin by Annaliza Bakri
Ah, the ink is still wet …
Tīfaifai and Translation: Piecing ‘Nadia’ from Chantal Spitz’s Cartes postales
In her 2006 collection of essays and poetry Pensées insolentes et inutiles, the pillar of francophone Oceanian literature that is Tahitian author Chantal T Spitz ruminates on the purpose of her writing: ‘This isn’t an autobiography but it now seems …
Scenes from a Slanting City: Theophilus Kwek Translates Zhou Hongxing
(周红星, 译: 郭慕义) Night, at noon. Even the brightest blaze from beyond my window glances off the hotel’s heavy drapes. Each morning’s case numbers leap higher than the last – look, how they dance before my eyes, like family. ~ …
4 Juan Paulo Huirimilla Oyarzo Translations by Stuart Cooke
Regarding the 4 Sonnets of the Apocalypse
4 Kim Un Translations by Anton Hur
Selections from It All Moves. Aesthetic It’s not easy to be alone. There I am, making an other. At the drop of a pin, I create an enemy. It’s fine to love him. What else would we talk about? At …
3 Ni Made Purnama Sari English Translations by Norman Erikson Pasaribu
My Hands my hands, have you finished any work today why do our thoughts keep vanishing, is your grip weakening stay close to me, we’ll spend our days with books again please stop writing poems about us going extinct have …
3 Savita Singh Translations by Medha Singh
End In Karnataka’s dark village, a family prepares to close the game of life. A mat is splayed out on the ground & poison mixed in a bowl. Seating the kids in a corner their mother caresses them, watching her …
