ABC of Translation is an expanded version of a few pages that first appeared in Willis Barnstone's The Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice. This book of aphorisms and meditations on translation is by one of the modern masters of the art of translation. Illustrated by the author. Translation is friendship between two poets, an intimate union that demands love, art and working with a foreign word. Know François Villon's song in French and the cello of his ballad will haunt you for life. Book jacket.

For twenty years, Ilan Stavans has been translating poetry from Spanish, Yiddish, Hebrew, French, Portuguese, Russian, German, Georgian, and other languages. His versions of Borges, Neruda, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Ferreira Gullar, Raúl Zurita, and dozens of others have become classics. This volume, which includes poems from more than forty poets from all over the world, is testimony to a life dedicated to the pursuit of beauty through poetry in different languages. “Lightning from the Stable” by Elizabeth Schön (Venezuela, 1921–2007) You don’t choose the abyss, the chaos, the nothingness They reach you in water running slowly for you not to be surprised by the absence of matter around you near the light of the soul calling the wing’s passing flap of the earth you live in.

Poetry is a highly valued form of human expression, and poems are challenging texts to translate. For both reasons, people willingly work long and hard to translate them, for little pay but potentially high personal satisfaction. This book shows how experienced poetry translators translate poems and bring them to readers, and how they not only shape new poems, but also help communicate images of the source culture. It uses cognitive and sociological translation-studies methods to analyse real data, most of it from two contrasting source countries, the Netherlands and Bosnia. Case studies, including think-aloud studies, analyse how translators translate poems. In interviews, translators explain why and how they translate. And a 17-year survey of a country’s poetry-translation output explores how translators work within networks of other people and texts – publishing teams, fellow translators, source-culture enthusiasts, and translation readers and critics. In mapping the whole sweep of poetry translators’ action, from micro-cognitive to macro-social, this book gives the first translation-studies overview of poetry translating since the 1970s.

His book investigates the problems and possibilities in the translation of literature, especially poetry. The investigation is based on a comparison between Catullus' sixty-fourth poem and English translations of it published between 1870 and 1970. Several strategies for translating are analyzed, and their comparative merits and faults are discussed. The book also tries to describe the position translation and translation studies should occupy in the wider context of the study of comparative literature. --from publisher description.

This volume, with contributions in the form of narrations, or of work sheets, by leading British and American translators, shows what happens: how problems present themselves and how they are resolved.