Women translators and editors form the basis of much of what is published on Poethead. Mostly they have a Western (English Language bias), although not always , (in the cases of Levertov, Ursu, Weil, Hassanzadeh, Nagy, amongst others for example ) though I do think that as readers and writers many women underestimate the small presses, the dedicated presses and the university presses. The areas of poetry that are translated are not necessarily specialisation; but represent modes of communication of those texts that are sorely neglected, and they are a virtual babel-tower of richness in literary inheritance.
Along with online resources, mentioned in the two short pieces on ethnopoetics and translations, which I will include as links at the end of this piece are book resources, in which sometimes Amazon can be your friend, though you can do worse than checking out the college bookshops, the specialist bookshops, and at the posher end those shops that deal in first editions and artistic editions.
I have also found some beautiful artistic and poetic collaborations published here in Ireland as part of art exhibitions or in reviews such as PIR. In essence, it’s not always in regular bookshops that there are treasures to be had, indeed some of them present a paucity in choice unfortunately, though that depends largely on the buyer’s skill.
Two presses that I enjoy are the Exeter Press and SUNY, whose rendering of Julian of Norwich and of Simone Weil are faultless and are both edited by women writers, who have that empathy of learning essential to their job. I am not going about quoting them this morning, because both of them appear on Poethead in various guises, although probably Julian is more neglected than Weil because the effort of concentration in reading requires more free time than I have currently available. There are two posts on the site which feature Marian Glasscoe’s translations of Julian of Norwich (in relation to the Penelopiad) and Weil’s Necessity translator , Joan Dargan appears frequently throughout the blog.
On a short note, the PH ephemera section needs updating because for some undiscussed reason the dot’s spot, later the Mostly Art blog have been cut (along with all blogs) from Politics.ie I dislike when such irrational decisions occur and it was for this reason that I decided to build up this blog, allowing (for once) my output to be self-determined. Decisions like adapting and censoring items are also outside the pale when it comes to choice of moderator , thus reducing and relinquishing all personal control of material to total strangers.
I think writers must become extremely careful about what type of site they publish on and look out for how their linked material is protected and disseminated when they sign up to the varieties of boards and foras that are available right now. This is especially relevant to material that one may wish to one day publish. I will be doing a post on this at a later date.
Ethnopoetics and Translations.
Translation and Linguistic Rights.
Atwood and Julian of Norwich
Chris Murray 