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Cyclops

Lost Without Translation: Ellen Elias-Bursać on “A Marriage Made in Translation”

Ellen Elias-Bursać, editor of Vlada Stojiljkovic‘s translation of Ranko Marinkovic‘s 1965 novel Cyclops, writes on the special and playful relationship formed between author and translator by their respective attentions to wit, banter, and humor, along with excerpts from the text. Like many previously published titles in the Margellos World Republic of Letters series, Cyclops is now [...]

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Poetry of Kabbalah

Lost Without Translation: Peter Cole on The Poetry of Kabbalah

The latest Margellos World Republic of Letters interview features acclaimed poet and translator Peter Cole on The Poetry of Kabbalah, the first English-language collection of poems from the Kabbalistic tradition. In the excerpt below, Cole discusses the history, culture, language, and identities that have shaped over a millennium of tradition in Jewish mystical verse, and of course, [...]

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Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me

Lost Without Translation: Fady Joudah on the Poetry of Ghassan Zaqtan

Fady Joudah first became associated with Yale University Press in 2007 when he was awarded the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize by then-judge Louise Glück, and the subsequent publication of his first volume of poetry, The Earth in the Attic, in April 2008. He returns to our list this spring as translator of Palestinian [...]

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Margellos World Republic of Letters Logo

Introducing the Margellos World Republic of Letters Website

Marcel Proust said: “The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes, in seeing the universe with the eyes of another, of hundreds of others, in seeing the hundreds of universes that each of them sees.” The Margellos World Republic of Letters series and its companion website [...]

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Second Simplicity, Bonnefoy and Rogers

Lost Without Translation: Yves Bonnefoy in Conversation with Hoyt Rogers

It’s snowing. Under the flakes, a door opens at last On the garden beyond the world. I set out. But my scarf Snags on a rusty nail, And the cloth of my dreams is torn. “The Garden,” by Yves Bonnefoy; translated from the French by Hoyt Rogers In Second Simplicity: New Poetry and Prose, 1991-2011, [...]

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My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet's Life in the Palestinian Century

In Memoriam: Taha Muhammad Ali

On October 2, 2011, the world bid farewell to Palestinian poet, Taha Muhammad Ali, whose powerful works resonated with the tone of loss in the twentieth century. Born in 1931 in the Galilee village of Saffuriyya, itself lost in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Muhammad Ali was an unlikely picture of a poet. In his own [...]

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Selected Lyrics

Gautier at the Opera

Tonight, L’Opéra National de Paris hosts the second of a two-night special event in honor of the bicentennial of the birth of Théophile Gautier, the French poet, dramatist, and critic who is known for his devotion to Art for Art’s sake. Author of the scenario for the classic ballet Giselle, Gautier fell in love with [...]

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A Little History of the World, Illustrated Edition

Who Says You Can’t Rewrite The History of the World?

Since you’ve been enjoying our contests and Nigel Warburton’s post on how E.H. Gombrich inspired his new book, we thought we’d try one more challenge for our readers, celebrating the new illustrated edition of A Little History of the World. So it’s not a rewrite, per se, (though the book does have a revised preface [...]

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Why Translation Matters

Say Good-bye to Your Dragon Tattoo: Why Translation Still Does and Will Always Matter

The importance of translation in bringing new books and ideas into English is crucial. Although no one has declared a universal language since Louis XIV, the dominance of English in international commerce, media, and even academia is impossible to ignore. Yet merely an estimated three percent of the hundreds of thousands of books published in [...]

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Adonis

Hope for Revolution, Art and Change: Adonis

Ali Ahmad Said Esber is better known to the Arabic world as Adonis, though he is only beginning his entrance into the Anglo world. Syrian-born and currently living in Paris, Adonis is, and has been for decades, one of the most popular modern poets writing in Arabic. His twenty volumes of poetry and thirteen books [...]

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