Zoë Skoulding

Katherine M. Hedeen

This anthology, featuring some of the most prominent poet-translators from both sides of the Atlantic, radically foregrounds the role of translators as bridge-builders and activists, with a crucial role in revealing the structures through which poetry moves and circulates. Organized around the translators (rather than the poets), with essays discussing the poetics and politics of their translations, this anthology forms unruly geographical lines of connection rather than underscoring existing national canons—shaping new understandings of contemporary poetry’s transnational commitments.

Born amid the shutting effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the book celebrates the community of translation—as Skoulding writes in her introduction, a "chance to live in the multiplicity of languages and the spaces of relation that it opens up," and its tangibility and visibility. "Far from the smooth loops and starry clusters of international flight paths, the haphazard map made by these poets emerges erratically from chance encounters, personal synergies, political commitments and tangles of literary influence.”

A Transatlantic Anthology of Translations

Poetry's Geographies

Juan Gelman

Víctor Rodríguez Núñez

In To World, poems interrogate everything: nature, society, and thought itself, with no prejudice or even principle. In other words, they don't follow any rule, tradition, or discipline; they are decidedly critical. Thought is not reduced to philosophical, ethical, religious, political, or aesthetic interpretations. Rather, we are before thought in its totality, unwilling to recognize borders - although never in a pure state, not falling into speculation, into thinking just for thinking's sake. Thought is always related to experience, both personal and collective, and above all, emotion. It never once stops being thought through image, that is to say, lyrical. This poetry speaks of poetry; it takes it all on: the objective and subjective, the real and imagined, I and other. It ventures into virgin territory, on the outskirts of romanticism, realism, symbolism, and the avant-garde. Always a model of rebelliousness and freedom, a lesson in devotion and rigor, Gelman's work places him among today's best poets.

Katherine M. Hedeen

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