TRANSLATIONS
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 The English translations are previously unpublished.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 …
6 Manoel de Barros Translations by Bruna Dantas Lobato and Flávia Stefani Resende
Translations from Country Boy. II. Our knowledge wasn’t from reading books. It was from grabbing from touching from listening and from other senses. Could it be a primal knowledge? Our words leaned on one another for love and not for …
3 Xhevdet Bajraj Translations by Alice Whitmore
The following translations are republished with kind permission from Laertes Books. They were originally published in the 2020 chapbook Emergency Exit: Recent Poems by Xhevdet Bajraj.
2 Nhã Thuyên Translations by Kaitlin Rees
this room’s determined to not let in anyone more, someone rumbles, so should i just leave now then, is there still time, sham, someone grumbles, so should i leave and wait for someone to invite me
6 Aya Mansour Translations by Haider Catan and Tim Heffernan
They didn’t allow me to collect the remaining perfume of my child, to arrange and hold it in my nose.
3 Dong Li Translations by Song Lin
Jorge Luis Borges Imagines China A sandglass. A second. Touch of the finest skin. Jade of joy. An itch. Secrets in books you have read sans a page number sans a punctuation mark. Chapter of the sun. Chapter of the …
6 Grzegorz Kwiatkowski Translations by Peter Constantine
In the summer of 2015, Grzegorz Kwiatkowski and his friend Rafal Wojczal made a gruesome discovery. Walking through the forest outside what was once the Stutthof Concentration Camp, where Kwiatkowski’s grandfather had been interned during the Second World War, the two young men came upon several thousand old shoes.
5 Halina Poświatowska Translations by Karolina Zapal and Ryan Mihaly
(women are prized for their beauty) women are prized for their beauty men for the shadow of their long lashes and poets for hiding flocks of aquamarine emotions in a word oblong night — under a kneecap moon the poets …
4 Róger Lindo Translations by Matthew Byrne
His poems rely on an aesthetic of ambiguity that enumerates the ambling routes a trauma-addled mind will travel. You never quite know what you’ll find around the corner, much less why it’s there.
