Following on from the 28-05-2010 Poethead post which was concerned in the provision of links to the excellent UBUWEB Ethnopoetics site (along with Pierre Joris‘ Homad), I thought to add in here a link to the International PEN Translation and Linguistic Rights Committee (which I shall do at the end of this short post).
Many of the books mentioned on Poethead are translations, indeed, they are for the most part either collaborative translations or translations which are rooted in the translator’s knowledge of and empathy with the Poet. All of the translations are direct transcriptions from the printed texts that are attributed at the end of the pieces in bold, save one or two transcriptions that came from photocopies or leaflets at various events and have been kept in small notebooks for years. The middle English translations are in the main from university presses. Indeed, I don’t think I have ever pushed a poem through a digital translator- though I have seen some appalling online clunky translations: particularly of Ágnes Nemes Nagy. The most sympathetic translations come from other poets or writers of prose, mentioned again and again are Tess Gallagher’s translations of Ursu, Peter Fallon’s Georgics, Agren Mc Elroy’s translations of Sachs or indeed Christopher Maurer’s Lorca Translations in Poet in New York. Pierre Joris’ essays on Celan and translations of Isacc Luria also are important from the point of view of literary dissemination.
The attached link is one that leads the reader to the PEN International Committee on Translation and Linguistic Rights, it is based in the Writer’s Perspective; if one moves over to the Righthand Column , there are a series of reports and PDFs on the issue which all writers and translators should be familiar with.
I am also adding in a link to the Poetry Ireland site , which has resources available on digitisation, translation and collaboration. There are a series of posts/article of Poethead regarding the Google Book Settlement , which also link onto the Poetry Ireland Pages regarding literary dissemination, copyright and Intellectual property Rights, which will be Part (iii) of this set of pieces.
The search engine at the top right of this page can be used to look up related articles, mostly the collaborative pieces are concerned in artistic collaborations; but helpful search engine terms here include:
Lilian Ursu, Alice Maher, Nelly Sachs, René Crevel, Federico Garcia Lorca, Ethnopoetics, Pierre Joris, Julian of Norwich, The Wife’s Lament, The Google Book Settlement and Paul Celan.
Running down the righthand column of PH are a set of blog links , which reflect the themes of the site , these contain similar links or further resources in arts and humanities that are part of Poethead.
Chris Murray 