Contemporary Translation in Transition: Poems, Theories, Conversations

This book investigates the hybrid, multiform nature of contemporary poetry with particular emphasis on recent Russian lyric and its translations into German and English. Poetry translation, thriving and obstinately open-ended, is not so much a defined process as a practice of ongoing transit across linguistic and national borders. The book’s innovative format invites contemporary poets into dialogue with literary translators, editors, publishers, and scholars; the conversations among their wide-ranging essays, poems, and exchanges both model and investigate the work of transcultural dialogue. As a kind of transition, poetry translation engages the composition and disintegration of forms, revises relations of producers to receivers, mixes and rethinks genres and media, translates itself as multilingual writing or language experiment. Multiple translations of a poem do not compete but interact, reshaping the putative gulf between source and target language. In the end this volume underscores the aesthetic productivity of poetry translation and the need to nurture it. A must-read for anyone interested in the dynamic interplay of poetry, language, and culture.