Folks From Here and There

Today sees the publication by Small Stations Press of Folks From Here and There by Álvaro Cunqueiro in Kathleen March's new translation. This follows fifteen years after Everyman published Merlin and Company in Colin Smith's translation and is set to coincide with the 100-year anniversary of the author's birth.

Kathleen March is well known for her work with Galician literature and in particular for her translation of an anthology of Galician short stories, Así vai o conto, and Circling by Ramón Otero Pedrayo. She is professor of Spanish at the University of Maine in the US, where she specialises in Galician, Latin American and Women's Studies.

This book is the second title in the series of Galician Classics created by the publisher Small Stations Press with the support of the Xunta de Galicia. The first title appeared in May this year and was the Collected Poems of Lois Pereiro.

Popescu Prize for Poetry in Translation

Two books of Galician poetry in English translation are among the 73 titles translated into English from twenty-five European languages nominated for the 2011 Popescu Prize.

The two Galician titles are: I Am Not from Here by María do Cebreiro, translated by Helena Miguélez-Carballeira (published by Shearsman Books in 2010) and the Collected Poems of Lois Pereiro, translated by Jonathan Dunne (published by Small Stations Press in 2011).

The Popescu Prize is awarded every two years and is administered by the UK Poetry Society and funded by the Ratiu Foundation. The winner of this year's prize, whose judges are Jane Draycott and Sasha Dugdale, will be announced in November.

Galician Poets in English

This week sees the publication in English of two books of Galician poetry. Shearsman Books publishes a third title by Chus Pato in Erín Moure's translation, Hordes of Writing, while Small Stations Press publishes the Collected Poems of Lois Pereiro (the subject of this year's Galician Literature Day on 17 May) in Jonathan Dunne's translation.


These two publications take the number of books of Galician literature published in English translation to 42. This list includes nineteen poetry titles and three mixed anthologies (poetry and prose). In December 2010, Poetry Review, the magazine of the Poetry Society, published a selection of Contemporary Galician Poets, which can be downloaded for free.

Interview with Neal Baxter

Neal Baxter was born in Shrewsbury, England, and studied Linguistics and French at York University. He later worked in the Diwan Breton language schools in Brittany. Since 1995 he has taught Interpreting at Vigo University, where he holds a doctorate in Translation Studies.

How did your involvement with Galicia come about?
My wife, who I met during my study year in Brittany, studied Spanish at Roazhon/Rennes University, which has contacts with Galiza and I went with her, variously with and without a grant, to attend the very first three years of Galizan language courses for foreigners organised by the Galician Language Institute in Santiago. After working for the Diwan Breton language schools for several years, we decided to make the move to Galiza, where we’d made a lot of friends who also introduced us both to the Galician Nationalist Bloc or BNG.


You’ve done a lot of work on the normal use of minority languages and genre/sexuality in translation. Where, in particular, is there a need to raise awareness?
My opinion pieces on Terra e Tempo Dixital deal mainly with the state of the Galizan language and militant atheism. The bulk of my academic research has, barring my dissertation, tended to centre on the place/portrayal of what could best be termed ‘socially marginalised’ groups (primarily wimin) within the context of ‘socially marginalised’ languages (mainly Galizan, but also touching on Welsh and Breton). Using this terminology perhaps helps to draw out how I see the two aspects as being related. As a believer in the impossibility of adopting a neutral stance on social questions within an objectively unbalanced context, my research is ‘engagé’ in the sense that I hope it helps contribute to change for the better, driven by the idea that the priority of preserving Galizan in the face of aggressive competition from Spanish does not require that other issues, such as the use of inclusive language to stimulate debate and explicitly highlight the role of wimin, need be disregarded as incompatible with this ‘higher’ aim. I am also pleased to see that this work has, in part at least, inspired students of mine to take their postgraduate research in that direction, notably with the recent PhD dissertation by Olga Castro, currently lecturing at Exeter University.

As a member of the Galician People’s Union or UPG’s Committee for International Relations, how do you view the role of a non-Galician in the context of Galician nationalism?
I joined the UPG and the BNG as well as the CIG trade union soon after I settled in Galiza. I am very proud of being a member of the UPG, having also served on the Local Committee, and would probably (and fairly) be described as a staunch upholder of the Party line. Although I’ve lived here so long, being a foreigner still provides you with the certain advantage of a perhaps more neutral or objective view of certain issues and a different way of thinking about them derived from a different cultural background. Having a native English-speaker and professional interpreter/translator is of course an asset when dealing with foreign delegations and when translating the International newsletter and press releases. Somewhat paradoxically perhaps I have been the language corrector for Terra e Tempo (official publication of the UPG) for several years because, as a non-native Galizan speaker who hasn’t formally learned any Spanish, it’s easier for me to spot interferences than it is for many Galizans.

How do you find living and raising a family in another culture? What are the specific challenges? And the dominant language at home?
I suppose we can’t pass on everything about Galizan culture directly but then again neither do a lot of Galizans… Fortunately we have a strong network of friends, almost all of whom are Galizan-speakers who provide additional input. My daughter never speaks Spanish with either of us at home and only speaks Galizan with certain friends, although Spanish dominates at school. The main home language is French, which I use with my wife. I only use English with my daughter, except on rare occasions where the situation would make it look as if we were deliberately excluding people, although I usually use English with her in front of friends, at BNG rallies, demonstrations, etc. It’s never even been commented upon, except to say how fortunate she is. We would like to have added Breton which she hears in the summer, but we thought four was enough for the time being.

Are you the Robert Neal Baxter who wrote a book called Chinese: That Marvellous Tongue (Joseph Biddulph, 1997)? What is the most curious language you’ve learned?
Yes, that’s me… At University, as part of the Linguistics course, we had to choose a new language out of Chinese, Hindi and Kiswahili. I dabbled in Yiddish years ago (which actually came in handy in Prague) and learned a bit of Nynorsk with Norwegian friends as university. I also did some Cornish in Brittany. More recently I had a go at isiZulu and isiXhosa (not much of a go really). I gave up Arabic after a while. My most recent interests have been Modern Greek, which I’ve been learning on and off for about four years, and Turkic languages, mainly Turkish and Azerbaijani. I have absolutely no Latin and no Ancient Greek!

Thank you for talking to us!

Galician poetry on BBC Radio 3

The English poet and editor Fiona Sampson, and the Galician writers Marilar Aleixandre and Xesús Fraga, are guests on BBC Radio 3's The Verb, presented by Ian McMillan, to talk about contemporary Galician poetry this evening. The interview is available for listening here from minute 9 to minute 20, but only until next Thursday.

Death on a Galician Shore

Today sees the publication in London of Domingo Villar's second novel, Death on a Galician Shore (A praia dos afogados). The English translation is by Sonia Soto, who also translates authors such as Arturo Pérez-Reverte and Guillermo Martínez. The book is published by Abacus (an imprint of Little, Brown).


Villar's first novel, Water-Blue Eyes (Ollos de auga), also featuring Inspector Leo Caldas, was published by Arcadia Books in 2007.

It is fantastic that, through the enterprise of his translators, Villar's work is reaching a wider audience. This brings the number of books of Galician literature in English translation to forty!

Reaction to the supplement of Contemporary Galician Poets

Here is some of the reaction to the supplement of Contemporary Galician Poets which accompanied the December 2010 issue of Poetry Review, following the visit to Galicia of the magazine's editor, Fiona Sampson, and the presentation of the supplement in Santiago de Compostela on Friday 11 March. The supplement is available for free download here.

El Correo Gallego (Luís González Tosar)

El País (Manuel Rivas)

Galicia Hoxe (Antón Lopo)

La Voz de Galicia (Xesús Fraga)

Xornal de Galicia (Alberto Ramos)

Radio Galega (interview with Fiona Sampson and Jonathan Dunne by Ana Romaní at the beginning of the programme Diario Cultural)

Galician poetry makes the front page

‘Welcome to the winter issue of Poetry Review, which celebrates The Poet’s Progress with a glowing image of the triple helix staircase in the Museo de Pobo in Santiago, Galicia. Our cover also celebrates the supplement of contemporary Galician poets which accompanies the magazine. Edited and translated by Jonathan Dunne, and published with the generous support of the Xunta de Galicia, it offers a rare insight into this vibrant Southern European Celtic culture.’

This is how Fiona Sampson, the editor of Poetry Review, opens her editorial in the winter 2010 issue that has just come out. Domingo de Andrade’s spiral staircase in the Galician People’s Museum in Santiago graces the front cover of the magazine, and that is because the magazine is accompanied by a supplement of contemporary Galician poets. Thirty-nine poems by nineteen poets introduce the reader of Poetry Review to Galician poetry being written today.


The poets included are: Xosé María Álvarez Cáccamo, Manuel Álvarez Torneiro, Yolanda Castaño, María do Cebreiro, Miguel Anxo Fernán Vello, Luís González Tosar, Bernardino Graña, Xulio López Valcárcel, Xosé Luís Méndez Ferrín, Olga Novo, Pilar Pallarés, Chus Pato, Alfonso Pexegueiro, Luz Pozo Garza, Manuel Rivas, Xavier Rodríguez Baixeras, Claudio Rodríguez Fer, Xavier Seoane and Xohana Torres. The selection and translation of the poems is by Jonathan Dunne.

With an immediate distribution of 4000 copies to the members of the UK Poetry Society, this supplement, the cover of which is decorated with a drawing by Chelín, is one of the most important publications of Galician literature in translation, surpassed in English only by the fiction of Manuel Rivas.

The magazine is available for purchase here at a cost of £9 (£11.50 if shipped outside the UK). The supplement itself is available for free download here.

New historical anthology of Galician literature

Francis Boutle Publishers have just published Breogán’s Lighthouse: An anthology of Galician literature, edited by Antonio Raúl de Toro Santos. This fine volume contains a total of over 200 texts of mainly poetry and fiction covering medieval literature, the so-called Dark Centuries and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The translations in this volume were carried out by John Rutherford (poetry and medieval prose) and by David Clark, Anne MacCarthy and Juan Casas, and Alan Floyd and Ana Gabín (modern prose). The book forms part of a Lesser Used Languages of Europe series, and contains a short introduction to Galician literature by Luciano Rodríguez and an essay on the Galician language by Manuel González González. Congratulations to all involved!

A revised list of books of Galician literature published in English translation is available here.

Interview with Aileen Dever (translator of Rosalía de Castro)

The following is an interview with Aileen Dever, who together with her father, John Dever, edited and translated The Poetry and Prose of Rosalía de Castro: A Bilingual Facing Page Edition.

What made you both decide to do this book?
First, my father and I decided to do this book because we truly fell in love with Rosalía’s poetry and hoped to give her a wider audience. There are some wonderful translations that have been done into English. However, we wanted to do a more comprehensive translation to give English-speaking readers and scholars a wider selection from which to choose and thus get to know more completely this remarkable writer. Second, we were drawn by Rosalía’s inclusivity in that she embraces all human beings. Her brand of ‘feminism’ is about caring for all people everywhere. There is so much Rosalía can teach us today.

How easy was it to find a publisher?
We were very fortunate as we found an advertisement for The Edwin Mellen Press at the annual National Association of Hispanic and Latino Studies conference in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, specifically seeking translations. We wrote to the press to determine their interest in our idea and Professor Herbert Richardson, Editor-in-chief, answered enthusiastically. So we excitedly began our project.

What was it like working two of you on a single translation? What surprises did this throw up?
It was particularly wonderful to work with my father on this translation because I had a chance to see him in a very different light. We live close to a beautiful park with oaks, elms, maples, and pine trees as well as a river. We would stroll most mornings through the park and discuss the poems we had apportioned ourselves, sometimes reciting lines of Rosalía’s poems as the wind whistled through the green leaves. Although we divided up the poems and prose between us, one of the best parts of the project occurred when we would look over our translations together, making suggestions and notes in the margins. Then mutually we would agree on the final version. It was surprising how much absolute fun we had talking about Rosalía’s poems and our translations. We became aware that there is indeed a creative process involved in translation as we sought just the right word or image to convey Rosalía’s meanings in our determination to do her artistic justice.

Did you try to keep the metre and rhyme of the original poems, or have you opted for a freer version of the poems?
We did not strive to keep the metre or rhyme of the original poems because we did not want to subject her beautiful poems to ‘straitjackets’ of sound. We were more concerned with maintaining the sense of her words. Sometimes, though, rhyme occurred seamlessly and then, of course, we would employ it. We found that alliteration/assonance were wonderful tools for conveying a poetic sense in English.

What other translations have you done, and are you planning to do more translations of Galician literature?
I have done a little translating of José Asunción Silva’s poetry. Perhaps I will turn my attention to translating a selection of his poems.

Finally, please could you show us the translation of a (short) poem you particularly liked?
Below is the translation of Rosalía’s well-known poem ‘Cando penso que te fuches’:

When I think that you’ve gone off,
dark shadow haunting me,
there again by my bed
you return taunting me.

When I imagine you’re gone,
in the very sun you show yourself,
and you are the star that glows,
and you are the wind that blows.

If there is singing, it is you who sings,
if there is crying, it is you who cries,
and you are the murmuring of the river
and you are the night and the dawn.

In everything you are and you are everything,
for me and in me you live,
nor will you abandon me ever,
shadow who haunts me forever.

Thank you for talking to us!

Fourth anthology published of Rosalía de Castro’s poetry

Edwin Mellen Press, who previously published two books of Galician literature in English, recently brought out a new anthology of Rosalía de Castro’s poetry, The Poetry and Prose of Rosalía de Castro: A Bilingual Facing Page Edition, edited and translated by John and Aileen Dever. Three anthologies of her poetry had appeared before this.

The Devers’ anthology contains a total of 103 poems from her three main books of poetry – Cantares gallegos, Follas novas and En las orillas del Sar – as well as short prose excerpts from Lieders, La hija del mar and Las literatas.

John Dever is emeritus professor of foreign languages and literature at Western Connecticut State University, while his daughter, Aileen Dever, is associate professor of modern languages at Quinnipiac University, also in Connecticut.

Reaction to the Anthology of Galician Literature 1196-1981

Here is some of the reaction to the Anthology of Galician Literature 1196-1981 edited in Galician and English by Jonathan Dunne, published in May by Edicións Xerais de Galicia and Editorial Galaxia, and presented on 5 June in Santiago de Compostela.

Edicións Xerais de Galicia

Editorial Galaxia

El País

Europa Press

Galicia Hoxe

La Voz de Galicia

Xornal de Galicia

Radio Galega (interview by Ana Romaní on Diario Cultural)

Televisión de Galicia (interview on Ben falado!)

To the Winds Our Sails

A wonderful publication has just reached my hands, courtesy of one of the translators, Lorna Shaughnessy, and this is an anthology of Galician women poets published in May by Salmon Poetry in Ireland. The anthology, edited by the Irish writer Mary O’Donnell and Manuela Palacios, associate professor of English literature at Santiago University, contains the work of ten Galician poets: Luz Pozo Garza, María do Carme Kruckenberg, Xohana Torres, Marilar Aleixandre, Luz Pichel, Chus Pato, Ana Romaní, María do Cebreiro, María Lado and Xiana Arias. Five poems each – four in English and one in Irish – have been translated using the talents of different Irish writers in what is a trilingual text: Galician-English-Irish. The cover is the work of Siobhán Hutson. Another book of Galician literature, but this time one that has appeared in both Irish and English!

Presentation of Anthology of Galician Literature 1196-1981

Today sees the presentation in Santiago de Compostela of the Anthology of Galician Literature 1196-1981 edited in Galician and English by Jonathan Dunne and published by Edicións Xerais de Galicia and Editorial Galaxia.

Since I cannot make the presentation, I would like to publish here the text I wrote in Galician for this occasion:

Como ocorre moitas veces, o corazón deste libro está nun apéndice. Se miran as páxinas 320 e 322, atoparán a lista de 55 xéneros, autores e libros que eu cría debían estar representados nunha antoloxía histórica da literatura galega. A maioría dos textos son do século XX: 31 fronte a 24 textos da época medieval, dos séculos XVI-XVIII e do Rexurdimento. Verán que inclúo textos da literatura de tradición oral, tan importante esta, e textos ensaísticos xunto con textos de poesía, ficción e teatro.

Elaborei esta lista en 1997, hai trece anos. Non sabía que o libro tardaría tanto tempo en facerse realidade. Decidín que para a selección dos propios textos, ¿que mellor que contar coa axuda de escritores e especialistas galegos? Por esta razón empecei a poñerme en contacto cos 55 antólogos para que escolmasen o seu anaco preferido de tal autor ou libro. A resposta foi entusiasta e xenerosa e o lado galego da antoloxía é unha reflexión histórica, feita dende dentro, sobre os textos cumios da literatura galega. Algúns dos antólogos xa faleceron: é o caso de José Ángel Valente, Antonio Fraguas Fraguas, Domingo García-Sabell, Manuel María, Antón Risco, Carlos Casares e Uxío Novoneyra. Pero alí están as súas escolmas.

Para a tradución para o inglés dos 55 textos fixen un esforzo por contar coa presenza de todos os que traballan neste momento no eido da tradución galego-inglés. Son 22 tradutores xunto co tradutor galego do meu limiar, o poeta Martín Veiga. Todos querían participar nun proxecto que ía axudar a espallar a cultura galega polo mundo.

Síntome orgulloso de ter participado con tanta xente nun proxecto destas características. Os libros sempre deben ir un pouco contra corrente. Non tiñan que existir, son instrumentos da fe. Amosan o lado bo do ser humano, a súa incansable fe e vontade de ser mellor.

Era hora de que Galicia tivese á súa disposición unha tradución literaria digna dalgúns dos seus autores máis importantes. A tradución é unha especie de exhalación, unha especie de morte continua. Non nos decatamos disto, pero somos todos tradutores, as cousas nin empezan nin terminan connosco, pasan a través de nós e saímos aprendendo.

Con este libro, estamos nas portas da literatura galega contemporánea e agardo que sexa posible, co mesmo equipo, sacar un segundo volume, unha antoloxía dedicada aos anos 1981-2011, que sería de moita utilidade para os editores estranxeiros interesados en publicaren a autores galegos. Reafirmo a miña disposición para este proxecto e dou as grazas aos editores aquí sentados: Manuel Bragado, de Edicións Xerais; Víctor Freixanes, de Editorial Galaxia, e o Conselleiro de Cultura e Turismo, Roberto Varela Fariña. Tamén á incomparable coordinadora de edición, co-autora deste libro, Anaír Rodríguez, e ao deseñador de cuberta, Miguel Vigo.

Agardo que este libro sirva de carta de presentación, xesto de benvida a todos, dentro e fóra do país, con interese na cultura galega.

Jonathan Dunne
Santiago de Compostela, 21 de maio de 2010

Anthology of Galician Literature 1196-1981

Today sees the publication by Edicións Xerais de Galicia and Editorial Galaxia of a bilingual Anthology of Galician Literature 1196-1981, edited by Jonathan Dunne, which aims to give the general reader a history of Galician literature through the texts themselves. Fifty-five texts by forty authors (and six voices that are anonymous) have been translated by a total of twenty-two translators working in the field of Galician-English translation. These range from medieval songs or cantigas to folk tales and verses, learned poetry, poetry of the Galician Revival (or Rexurdimento) and classic authors of the 20th century writing a mixture of fiction, poetry, essay and theatre. While the editor, Jonathan Dunne, chose the genres, authors and books that would be represented in this anthology spanning 785 years, from the first literary text written in Galician-Portuguese to the 1981 Galician Statute of Autonomy, the texts themselves were chosen by Galician writers and specialists from José Ángel Valente to Carlos Casares, Manuel María, Uxío Novoneyra, Xosé Luís Méndez Ferrín, Manuel Rivas and a host of others. In total, 124 people contributed to this book, which it is hoped will act as a letter of introduction to all those from outside who wish to know more about Galician culture and the foundations of contemporary Galician literature.

Coincidentally, Francis Boutle Publishers are due to bring out another historical anthology of Galician literature, Breogán’s Lighthouse, edited by Antonio Raúl de Toro Santos. These two books will bring the total of Galician books published in English to 38.

María do Cebreiro’s first book published in English

Congratulations to the poet María do Cebreiro on the publication by Shearsman Books in Exeter of I Am Not from Here in Helena Miguélez-Carballeira’s translation.

This is only the fifth book by a contemporary Galician poet to be published in English, joining two titles by Chus Pato also published by Shearsman Books, one title by Miguel Anxo Murado and one by Manuel Rivas. There have also been several anthologies.

In 2008 María was the first Galician writer-in-residence at Bangor University, where Helena is lecturer in Spanish and director of the Centre for Galician Studies.

Steve Porter

It’s always good to find a kindred soul, and one such exists in Coruña. Steve Porter hails from Forres, which must be an incredible town since it’s located on the Moray Firth, the largest ría in Scotland, with Inverness at its base. Not satisfied with that, though, Steve moved to Edinburgh, where he studied Spanish at the university, and on to Galicia, Andalusia, Valencia and Catalonia, an experience he recorded like Laurie Lee in a book, The Iberian Horseshoe - A Journey.

Since then, Steve has published a collection of poetry, Shellfish and Umbrellas, and completed a novel, Countries of the World, excerpts from which are available on his blog, Steve Porter’s World of Books. He has another blog, Galidonia.

This man of the coast translates from Galician, Catalan, Portuguese and Spanish into English and Scots, including work by the Galician poet Eduardo Estévez, of which the following poem is an example:

subprime lending

she had some money
saved

and kept it
in an old boxwood
chest
in a secret corner
of her
room

each month
she’d been putting away
a bit of the
meagre social security

the children left
for the city

and only dropped by
the airless dark damp
house on
public holidays
that was about it

life was sorted

they didn’t want
for anything to eat
(the grandchildren even less so)
but they always moaned
about a lot of work
and worries

one day she had
a heart scare

an ambulance came
and she had to spend
several days
in the hospital
there in the capital

it was april
yet it was snowing
behind the blinds
of the room

on returning home
she checked
straightaway
that the money-box
was still intact in its
hiding place

on sunday
coming out of mass
she waited for
the priest
in the vestibule
and bought from him
without credit
nor mortgage
a tomb near
her husband

on the way
back home
her feet carried her
lightly

with a gentle
heart

Interview with John Burns (translator of Amado Carballo and Manuel Antonio)

You spent your year out in Santiago de Compostela and returned a year later to study Galician. What were your impressions of the city?
Santiago de Compostela is the most beautiful, culturally vibrant city I’ve ever lived in. I would love to know how many umbrellas I lost there, accidentally leaving them in the paragüeros on the way out of bars or cafés after the rain had let up. As an American, the layering of time that one experiences in Santiago, such as being able to walk out through the remains of a medieval gate and catch a cab, is particularly striking.

How fluid is the dialogue between Latin American writers and mainstream English literature in the States?
The dialogue between Latin American and mainstream US literature moves along at a stutter. In the US book market and the broader US imaginary, there is still a tendency to reduce Latin America to an exotic collage of poverty and revolution. Recently Chilean-born novelist Roberto Bolaño has begun to emerge in English translation and I think he is one of the first writers to come to prominence in the US beyond the limited realm of writers in the vein of magic realism. One very interesting contemporary writer in the US is Junot Díaz, whose work is starting to make inroads in Spanish translation in Latin America.

What are the specific challenges of translating Beat poetry into Spanish?
One of the difficulties of translating Beat poetry is determining the limits of the group. Beyond the main group of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs and Corso, we’ve made a conscious effort to include some poets whose work has not been translated extensively into Spanish, such as Bob Kaufman, Joanne Kyger or John Wieners. Preserving the dissidence of their work, which I think is still very apparent to readers of English who pick it up some fifty-odd years later, was also one of our main goals. We wanted to make the work as open, accessible and yet as challenging as it is in English without taming it in any way.

And translating Manuel Antonio’s avant-garde poetry into English?
For some of Manuel Antonio’s lexical peculiarities, it was at times necessary to do some very complicated linguistic sleuthing. Once the sleuthing was done, finding the right tone for a young poet writing in Galician in the early twentieth century as he tries to hold hands with literary currents that played out in dominant languages such as Spanish and French was quite a challenge. I think in many ways in the back of my mind I was filtering him through English translations of Huidobro and Reverdy, and through the the imagist phase of Pound and the work of objectivists like George Oppen and Charles Reznikoff.

How do you tie together the threads of Galician, Latin American and medieval literature, or are they all quite separate?
I think in many ways they are quite separate, but they do have curious ways of overlapping in the classroom as part of the broader project of training undergraduate majors of Spanish in the US. In introductory culture classes you may well stumble upon Rosalía de Castro, Gabriel García Márquez and Alfonso X in the same historical narrative in the course of a semester or two. To touch briefly again on Roberto Bolaño, in his posthumous novel 2666, one of the main characters, a Chilean named Amalfitano, becomes obsessed with a treatise on geometry written by Rafael Dieste (who was, curiously, Manuel Antonio’s translator into Spanish) which, in the novel, was purchased in Follas Novas in Santiago de Compostela. If you venture into Follas Novas today and ask for Bolaño’s books, you can almost be certain to be told about this fact by the booksellers: a bookstore named after one of the most important texts in Galician from the nineteenth century plays an important role in one of the most important Latin American novels of the twenty-first.

Thank you for talking to us!

Books Burn Badly published in English

Manuel Rivas’ latest novel, Books Burn Badly (Os libros arden mal), is published in a magnificent hardback edition on 18 February by Random House. This is Manuel Rivas’ sixth publication in English. Harvill Secker (previously Harvill Press) has published three novels and two books with short stories, while Small Stations Press brought out a selection of his poetry in March 2009. The author and his translator, Jonathan Dunne, are in London to promote the book between 25 and 27 February, including an event at one of London’s most emblematic bookshops, Foyles.

The cover is the work of Michael Salu.

A full list of Galician books published in English can be found here.

John Burns to translate Amado Carballo and Manuel Antonio

American poet and translator John Burns will translate the poems by Luis Amado Carballo and Manuel Antonio for the bilingual Anthology of Galician Literature to be published by Xerais and Galaxia in spring 2010. These two texts were specially chosen for the anthology by Luis Alonso Girgado and Domingo García-Sabell respectively.

John holds a degree in Spanish, English and Creative Writing from the University of Maine, where he studied with Kathleen March (another translator in the anthology) and was named the outstanding graduate in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. During this course he spent a year in Santiago, studying medieval and Latin American literature, and returned to Santiago a year later to take a summer course in Galician at the Institute of the Galician Language. His doctorate, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was on Imagining the Poet: Strategies of Contemporary Spanish-Language Poets in the Era of Globalization. He is currently Assistant Professor of Spanish at Rockford College in Illinois.

John is responsible for two of the 32 books of Galician literature so far published in English – a translation of From Four to Four by the avant-garde poet Manuel Antonio (his undergraduate thesis) and an anthology of contemporary Galician poetry published by the Galician PEN Club, Poetry Is the World’s Great Miracle. He also translated a chapbook of María do Cebreiro’s poetry for the series Backwoods Broadsides. His most recent project is an anthology of Beat poetry, which he co-translated with the Mexican poet Rubén Medina. He has published two chapbooks of his own poetry with Pine Press, The Sand Between Aphrodite’s Toes and The Nearing Notebooks.

We are delighted that John will bring his rich experience as poet and translator to bear on this anthology!

Interview with Craig Patterson (translator of Forever in Galicia)

Was your first interest in Galicia as a place or as a culture?
I was vaguely aware of Galicia as a corner of Spain from the late 1980s and early 1990s, from my studies at school and into the summer of 1992 before I went to university. I can remember reading Ian Gibson’s Fire in the Blood and seeing a beautiful colour photograph of the bateas in some ría, probably Vigo, and thinking how beautiful the image was. Within months of starting the degree at Birmingham, we had all identified David Mackenzie as some sort of Galicianist ambassador. He seemed to be permanently escorted everywhere by two Galicians, who were lectores rather than bodyguards in the employ of the Xunta, and was always making references to that quirky, rainy place up there by the Atlantic. I was encouraged to spend my Erasmus year, or third year of my undergraduate degree, in Santiago de Compostela by my best friend, who then as now knew me better than I knew myself. I went to Salamanca instead, because of love. Only that love didn’t last, and into 1995 I had more time on my hands, and so with the same best friend drove up to Santiago one bright February day. The photograph of us stood outside the cathedral as the last rays of the autumn sun strike its facade is a cherished possession, and memory. I think it was then that I fell in love with at least one love of my life. A brief three-day tour followed, and we wound our way down through the Rías Baixas, leaving Galicia via Vigo. I knew that something had irrevocably changed in my life. Back in Birmingham to finish off my degree and hopefully launch into doctoral research, a meeting with Derek Flitter, who by then I am proud to say had begun to play the role of an intellectual mentor, furnished my first contact with Ramón Otero Pedrayo. And barely an hour after that meeting I met a girl from Vigo with whom I fell in love, and that took me through my years in Oxford under the kind, wise and generous guidance of John Rutherford. Galicia, more than any other place with which I have been associated in my life, has provided me with the greatest number of moments when you are undoubtedly aware of your life changing in front of you, as you speak, xa! It’s what I call ‘accidental destiny’, and I am proud to be a sufferer.

How much does the cultural thinking of people like Castelao and Ramón Otero Pedrayo bear on the Galicia of today?
I think a lot less than their champions would have us believe, and a lot more than their critics would care or dare to recognise. They are a reference point, to state the obvious, and cannot be ignored. They constructed, literally and literarily, the cultural coordinates for an updated reading of Galician identity, but did so of course through the medium of their own aesthetic and political codes of preference, and prejudice. We owe them a great deal, but it is healthy to deconstruct all things, and they should not be an exception to that rule: modern Galician culture will be all the more robust for casting a cold eye upon sacred cows, and possibly for making the odd parrillada out of one or two.

What is the role of Galician Studies in places like Cardiff?
Wales is a periphery, and Cardiff its capital. The presence of Galicia, another Atlantic periphery, in the university and the city is testament to both the appeal of Galician culture, and the need for broad representation of the cultural and linguistic diversity to be found under the umbrella of nation states. Wales and Galicia have much to learn from each other, and I am delighted to play an ongoing role in that process whose promise is immense.

What do you hope can be achieved during your time as president of the International Association of Galician Studies?
We seek to make the AIEG a truly international and multidisciplinary organisation in all aspects: membership, practice, scope and of course ambition. As the only overarching association centred upon Galician Studies in the world, the AIEG needs to embrace and champion all intellectual activity that takes place through the medium of Galician, or which relates in some form or other to Galician reality, past, present and future. On a much more practical note, we are carefully revising many of the AIEG’s internal mechanisms and processes, to ensure that the foundations are laid for the organisation to function to the best of its ability throughout the XXI century. One such measure, which may not seem so important, but which has allowed us to communicate with a large amount of people in a short space of time, is the AIEG Facebook site. Finally, I would like to say that if the formidable team that is the current AIEG executive fulfils but half of its goals, then it will have done a magnificent job. The conference in Cardiff, September 2012, will be a celebration open to all.

If you had to choose a Galician town, book and dish, what would they be?
‘And what would yours be…?’ The trickiest question comes at the end, and it’s one of the trickiest that I have ever had to answer. I’m doomed to failure with my answer one way or another, because many friends will be put out with my choices. I love Ribadeo, Betanzos and Vigo passionately, and am increasingly enjoying my time spent in A Coruña. But there can only be one, and all roads lead to Santiago. The book has to be Sempre na Galiza, a ramshackle collage of an opus which is truly unique, if only for its often brief but moving passages about the author’s love of his lost homeland, and its overwhelming moral argument for the right of anyone or anything to determine its own destiny. The dish, to be very specific, has to be polbo á grella in the Dezaseis. I try to go there once every time that I am in town.

Thank you for talking to us!

Craig Patterson to translate Forever in Galicia by Castelao

Craig Patterson, lecturer in Galician and Hispanic Studies at Cardiff University, will translate the text from Forever in Galicia by Castelao for the bilingual Anthology of Galician Literature to be published by Xerais and Galaxia in spring 2010. The text was chosen by Xosé Neira Vilas and is one of three essays included in the anthology.

Anyone who knows Craig knows of the labour of love that is his excellent and much-needed translation of Forever in Galicia by Castelao (due out with University of Wales Press in 2011). Craig has a degree in Hispanic Studies from the University of Birmingham and a doctorate on Galician Cultural Identity in the Works of Ramón Otero Pedrayo from Queen’s College, Oxford. His doctorate, published by Edwin Mellen Press in 2006, was published in Xabier Cid’s Galician translation as O devalar da idea: Otero Pedrayo e a identidade galega by the Otero Pedrayo Foundation in 2008. He was Sir Henry Thomas Junior Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham and lecturer in Spanish at the University of Stirling before becoming lecturer in Galician and Hispanic Studies at the School of European Studies in Cardiff.

He contributed to the translation of Things by Castelao and Them and Other Stories by Xosé Luís Méndez Ferrín, both published by Planet Books in Wales. Planet Books will soon bring out his translation of another Galician classic – A esmorga (On a Bender) by Eduardo Blanco Amor.

Craig is president of the International Association of Galician Studies and a corresponding member of the Royal Galician Academy. He contributes a weekly column, Devalar, to the Galician newspaper Galicia Hoxe. We are delighted that his translation of Castelao’s work will appear in the anthology!

Richard Zenith to translate two cantigas

The award-winning translator and Pessoa expert Richard Zenith will translate two medieval poems for the bilingual Anthology of Galician Literature to be published by Xerais and Galaxia in spring 2010.

Born in Washington DC, Richard has lived since 1987 in Lisbon, where he works as a researcher in the Pessoa archives. He has prepared numerous editions of Pessoa’s work, including a seven-volume Obra Essencial de Fernando Pessoa published in 2006-7 by Assírio & Alvim. His translation Fernando Pessoa & Co.: Selected Poems won the 1999 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. Other translations of work by Pessoa include A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems, The Book of Disquiet and The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa.

He has also translated poetry by Luís de Camões, João Cabral de Melo Neto and Sophia de Mello Breyner and novels by António Lobo Antunes, José Luandino Vieira and José Luís Peixoto. His Education by Stone: Selected Poems by João Cabral de Melo Neto won the 2006 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award.

In 1995, the British publisher Carcanet brought out his landmark 113 Galician-Portuguese Troubadour Poems, an edition Richard is in the process of revising and enlarging. Holder of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1987 and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1988, he has also published his own stories and poems.

We are extremely fortunate, therefore, that Richard will contribute two translations to the anthology: a song of love or cantiga de amor chosen for the anthology by Elsa Gonçalves and a song of Holy Mary or cantiga de Santa María chosen for the anthology by José Ángel Valente.

Interview with Carys Evans-Corrales (translator of Aquilino Iglesia Alvariño)

You were born in London, raised in Singapore and Malaysia and currently live in the States. Do you consider that you have a nationality?
In some way moving to the States, where so many people cherish bits and pieces of their family’s heritage from other parts of the world, finally settled for me the nagging feeling of wishing I had a nationality that suited who I was. I realized finally that it didn’t really matter, that I would be who I was regardless of what my passport said. But when I was younger the nationality issue was huge. As a teenager in Kuala Lumpur, for example, I felt completely identified with my Malaysian neighbors and schoolmates, much more so than with any British youngsters I happened to meet, mainly because they were usually either people who were growing up in UK boarding schools and happened to be visiting their parents for the holidays, or they were the children of the British Armed Forces who had a school of their own and a milieu very much to themselves. So I tagged the Brits as a very practical, down-to-earth people who spoke in a very direct idiom, so unlike the Malay that I was learning at school, a language that seemed so very cool and elegant. And as a teenager at the time I did so want to be cool and elegant!

The same sort of thing happened in Seville, where I first lived as a student in Spain. I was already bowled over by the sounds and flexibility of Spanish at school in Jamaica, and when this combined with the flair and wit of Andalusian Spanish I was totally seduced by it. Later, of course, after I moved to Santiago de Compostela, Galician played various notes in myself that were waiting to develop.

You were in Santiago at the end of Franco’s dictatorship. What do you remember most about those years?
Goodness! I hardly know where to start! People had expected that an explosion of long-repressed freedom in every arena of life (and perhaps a harsh corresponding backlash) would occur immediately after Franco’s death, and this liberation did in fact occur despite the variety, strength and complexity of reactions to the dictator’s demise. But any significant, lasting backlash was averted owing in part to the fact that a few years of rule by Franco’s party continued before democracy could be officially established. Some brave individuals and organizations had for a long time and at great personal risk been working to bring about a political and linguistic rebirth that reflected the wishes of the Galician people more closely, and their plans were therefore already partially established when democracy finally arrived and continued to develop thereafter.

But now that one would not necessarily be seen as a separatist agitator for supporting Galician culture, life in Santiago was like a cross between a kaleidoscope and a jack-in-the box. You never knew which previously reclusive neighbor would announce a run for office under the auspices of a bright, new and outspoken political group, or what previous pillar of society who had never spoken in public in anything but good, conservative Castilian would suddenly surprise the city with political speeches in faultless Galician. Schoolbooks began to be written in the language, with vocabulary that reflected – and gave value to – the world of the children who used them, and there was a blossoming of academic, literary, artistic and musical life at all levels. Above all, people were no longer afraid to implement new ideas, and a certain shame that I had often heard expressed regarding being a nation subjected to a dictatorship seemed to melt away. It was as if people now felt they could truly be considered part of Europe. I remember it all as a time of heady adventure and great hope for the future, and it played a very important part in my personal development.

Which are the Galician poets you have come into contact with? Whose work have you enjoyed most?
The first Galician poet I read was, not surprisingly, Rosalía de Castro, but I was so immediately overwhelmed by the sense of nostalgia and suffering that emanated from her work that I decided to put the poems back on the shelf for another time. Years later, as a graduate student, I began to read them again and have gone back to them at intervals ever since. I also like the work of Miguel-Anxo Murado very much. I found his Bestiario dos descontentos struck a familiar chord – perhaps because it evoked the Welsh hiraeth, a particular sense of loss found in much of traditional Welsh poetry. There have been many Galician poets whose work I am attracted to, but perhaps I should mention above all Pilar Pallarés and Blanca Andreu (for very different reasons), and more recently Álvaro Cunqueiro and Manuel Rivas.

How do you succeed in making an English poem out of a foreign poem? Is it necessary, when translating a poem, to stay close to the poem you are translating from (I avoid the word ‘original’)?
I find I can’t stray very far from my source poem because I am always trying to keep my mind within a funny kind of telepathic communication with it. My first draft is always strictly literal, in order to retain as much of the poem’s thematic and linguistic intent as I possibly can, and after that I work away at key pieces of it until I feel they reflect as much as possible of what the poet is saying. Then I work on the whole translation as a poem within a style that corresponds as much as possible to the poet’s. This part calls for the most drafts, which I reread constantly until I am satisfied that the translation does as much justice to the poet as I am personally capable of. Although I understand that a good translated poem is in itself an original work of art produced by another poet, I feel that a translated poem ‘inspired’ by a work by a foreign author does not help the reader in the second language all that much. If someone acquires a translation of a foreign poet, it is because he or she wants to discover in some way the impact of the work on its first readers – to capture at second hand, if you like, the intent of the first author, to whatever degree may be possible. A version even further removed than that interposes another wall – no matter how well wrought – between the reader and the first poet’s work.

Thank you for talking to us!
It was a pleasure, Jonathan!

Carys Evans-Corrales to translate Aquilino Iglesia Alvariño

Carys Evans-Corrales has agreed to translate the poem by Aquilino Iglesia Alvariño for the bilingual Anthology of Galician Literature to be published by Xerais and Galaxia in spring 2010. The poem was chosen for the anthology by Basilio Losada.

Carys Evans-Corrales translates from Galician and Spanish. Her translation of A Bestiary of Discontent by the Galician poet Miguel-Anxo Murado was published by Edwin Mellen in 1993 and is one of 32 books of Galician literature published in English. Born in London, she was raised in Singapore and Malaysia and spent three years in Jamaica, developing a lifelong fascination with language. After taking a degree in Linguistics at the University of York in England, she moved to Galicia in the early 1970s to begin a position as English language assistant at the University of Santiago de Compostela. Moved by the beauty of the language and spurred by the excitement of the post-Franco flowering of Galician identity and letters, it was there she took her first steps in translating from Galician to English. In 1985 she left Galicia for the United States, where she received a doctorate in Spanish Literature from Rutgers University. She currently teaches Spanish and Comparative Literature at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford.

Interview with Margaret Jull Costa (translator of Eduardo Blanco Amor)

What are the different stages involved in translating a short story?
It’s not really any different from translating a novel – just shorter! I do a good first draft, then a second draft – again reading my translation against the original – and then I keep rereading and editing until the whole thing feels as if it has a life and a voice of its own, going back and forth from translation to original. En route, there are often facts or names I need to check and, with this particular story, there were often Galician expressions I didn’t understand, which sent me running to the Internet, to online dictionaries, to Jonathan and, through Jonathan, to other Galician experts.

What, in your opinion, makes for a good short story?
The very best short stories encapsulate a whole world or a whole life in a few pages. That’s why they’re so difficult to write, so much has to be condensed, so much left unsaid. There’s no room for excess information.

Who would you say are the great short-story writers of the last 100 years?
Well, Chekhov (who just scrapes into the last 100 years) was, I think, the master of the short story, but others on my list would (in no particular order) be Kafka, Flannery O’Connor, Herman Melville, Henry James, Katherine Mansfield, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Isaac Bashevis Singer, D. H. Lawrence, Alice Munro, P. G. Wodehouse (especially the Mr Mulliner stories), Richmal Crompton (her early William stories are comic masterpieces), William Trevor (to be taken in small doses), Garrison Keillor, Lorrie Moore… and two of ‘my’ writers – Bernardo Atxaga and Teolinda Gersão.

And your favourite short story?
Can I have two? The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad and The Little Shoemakers by Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Why do you think a country such as Galicia has such a strong tradition of story-telling?
My impression is that story-telling thrives in cultures where the oral tradition is very strong, like Galicia, Russia, the southern states of America, Ireland, in Jewish and Yiddish culture, perhaps in cultures that are marginalised in some way, particularly by poverty. Stories are a way of shoring up your identity and having something of your own.

Thank you for talking to us!

Margaret Jull Costa to translate Eduardo Blanco Amor

The celebrated translator Margaret Jull Costa has agreed to translate the story by Eduardo Blanco Amor for the bilingual Anthology of Galician Literature to be published by Xerais and Galaxia in 2010.

Margaret is best known for her translations of José Saramago, Eça de Queiroz, Javier Marías and Bernardo Atxaga. She won the 1997 International IMPAC Award for her translation of A Heart So White by Marías, while her translation of Saramago’s All the Names won the 2000 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, a prize she won again last year for her translation of The Maias by Queiroz. This translation, which also won the 2008 PEN Translation Prize, forms part of a project to translate or re-translate all the major works of the 19th-century Portuguese novelist.

Other authors Margaret has translated include Paulo Coelho, Fernando Pessoa, Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Juan José Saer and Ramón del Valle-Inclán. She co-edited with Annella McDermott The Dedalus Book of Spanish Fantasy.

Margaret brings huge experience to the anthology and we are delighted she will translate a story by Eduardo Blanco Amor chosen for the anthology by Anxo Tarrío Varela.

Interview with Erín Moure (translator of Rosalía de Castro and Luis Pimentel)

Erín Moure is an unusual name. Is there a story?
Everyone’s name is a story! I think I’m the only one in the universe with my name… it’s simply the product, as I am, of 19th century European hunger and emigration. I’m half Polish/Ukrainian on my mom’s side and Galician/French/Irish/English on my Dad’s… my family name is that of my great grandfather who left Crecente, Pontevedra province (near the Miño… he was already a border dweller) in 1848. All ties were lost with Galicia when that fellow died in 1874 or so. My grandfather, his son, was very young when his widowed English (we think) mother brought her small children to Canada where her brother could help them. When I first went to Galicia in 1994 I decided to learn the language.

You’ve worked with poets from all around the world. What makes the Galician voice particular?
Not quite all around the world! In parts. I don’t believe in a singular Galician voice; for me that would be essentializing a multitude of voices, registers, patterns, movements in poetry. Galician poetry to me is very full, very dense in its imagery… it’s a poetry, overall, that has no problem spanning urban and rural worlds at once, and no problem in leaping borders, though it is, oh yes, grounded in the particularities of its place, of its time, of the history of the poetry that precedes it and on which it builds… it is intriguing to help it leap borders where it can dialogue with (in my case) other poetries in English.

What makes it universal?
I don’t know that I believe in ‘the universal’ as it usually co-opts one version of what is truly universal (that we share a species, that we are animals, we are born and die and affect each other in the space between) in order to browbeat other versions of this struggle. Galician poetry is as various as any other. In it, there are voices that could profitably affect, change, create foment in my own language’s poetry… it is amazing how poetry can leap borders… leaving behind some particularities and gaining others in the crossing.

What was the first text you translated?
From any language? Oh I don’t remember! I think it was trying to figure out what my parents were saying in English, to explain to my brother, 11 months younger than me, in our private language. From a recognized language into English, probably it was in my head, while in France or Spain, and trying to find the sign for the way to the toilet! In poetry, a poem of Neruda’s, before I could read Spanish, actually. I just translated what arose for me when I read what I could not read.

My introduction to the idea of translation was through Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes, as at the end of it, there was my first bilingual dictionary: Ape-English (but not the reverse). It was utterly unusable, though I tried. I showed it once to Manuel Rivas, and it makes an appearance, slantwise, in Os Libros Arden Mal… if you recall.

What has translation taught you?
Que somos seres multiples… Je ne sais pas. I translate all the time as I think in three languages, all badly mastered. Temos que deixar entrar o que non somos, para ser, e estar. We have to let what is not us enter us, in order to be, and be present.

What’s your favourite poem by a Galician author, and have you translated it?
Ah I have many favourites. I love the medieval lyric and have made crazy wondrous quiet versions out of parts of Sedia-m’eu na ermida de San Simión by Meendinho, in my own O Cadoiro. And I love the ‘chronology of practice: synopsis’ of Chus Pato from her Charenton, which is on pp. 82-83 of the English… which later I reset in the form of the floor plan for the Dia:Beacon sculpture museum north of New York City… I followed the same floor plan to map my own chronology of practice, and these floor plan maps were published last year in the Canadian journal West Coast Line. Following that, the idea was taken up by Canadian poet Margaret Christakos in Toronto, who runs a poetry salon called Influency… in the most recent Influency program, 36 people were enrolled, and they all made maps of influence after being introduced to Chus’s and mine… Other Canadian poets have made such maps too (I know this by fact and rumour)… Thus something Chus made in Galician, and I got excited about and brought into English, both conventionally and with a leap, makes its way in English as a force field for change and beauty in Canadian literature.

That’s how it’s supposed to work, I think… what moves me later moves someone else, across the boundaries of a given language, and the literature itself changes.

Thank you for talking to us!

Erín Moure to translate Rosalía de Castro and Luis Pimentel

The Canadian poet and translator Erín Moure has agreed to translate two poems for the bilingual Anthology of Galician Literature to be published by Xerais and Galaxia in 2010. She will translate the poem from Follas novas by Rosalía de Castro and the poem by Luis Pimentel.

Erín Moure’s 1988 poetry collection Furious won the Governor General’s Award, and she has twice won the A M Klein Prize for Poetry: in 1990 for WSW and in 2005 for Little Theatres. She has three times been shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize worth $50,000: in 2002 for Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person (a translation of Fernando Pessoa’s O Guardador de Rebanhos), in 2006 for Little Theatres and in 2008 for her co-translation of Notebook of Roses and Civilization by Nicole Brossard. Little Theatres was published as Teatriños by Editorial Galaxia in 2007.

Erín translates from French, Galician, Portuguese and Spanish. In addition to Pessoa and Brossard, she has translated two books by Chus Pato for Shearsman Books in England and BuschekBooks in Canada: Charenton and m-Talá. She was recently awarded an honorary doctorate from Brandon University in recognition of her contributions to poetry.

It is an honour to be able to count on Erín’s presence in the anthology, translating poems chosen for the anthology by Carmen Blanco (from Follas novas) and by Luz Pozo Garza (by Luis Pimentel).

m-Talá published in English

Spring is in the air and, with it, the second book of Galician poetry published in English this month! Following the publication of From Unknown to Unknown by Manuel Rivas, Shearsman Books in the southwest of England today bring out Chus Pato’s seminal work m-Talá in Erín Moure’s translation, published simultaneously by BuschekBooks in Canada. Shearsman Books brought out the later title Charenton in 2007.

Helena González defines m-Talá on the publisher’s website as ‘a model for all Galician poetry’. ‘The poetics of chaos is an inalienable characteristic of the work of Chus Pato. But in m-Talá she wipes out the borders of literary conventions. The multiple discourses and languages around us erupt into, and construct, the poem. Reading this book is a challenge and play from which humour is never far.’

Erín Moure is the accomplished translator and a poet in her own right with a dozen books of poetry. There will be an interview with her next month on this blog.

You will find a full list of books of Galician literature published in English here.

Interview with Michael Smith (translator of Ramón Cabanillas)

You both write and translate poetry. How similar are the two experiences? Is writing a form of translation, or is it the other way round?
Writing my own work and translating that of others are two quite different experiences for me. How generally true this is I can’t say. For many, Roy Campbell was a very fine translator of Spanish poetry but for me all his translations from the Spanish have a similar rhythm as if they were all written by the same poet. When I am writing my own poetry, I am drawing on my own life. When I am translating, I am drawing on the life of someone else. I am not a literalist nor am I an imitator in Lowell’s sense of that word. When I translate I put whatever language skills I have at the service of another. I see myself as the servant but not the slave of the work I am translating. A good deal of modesty and self-effacement are needed to be a good translator.

A lot of the poets you translate are classical poets. What do they have to tell us that contemporary poets can’t?
In the increasingly dehumanised world of global consumerism, they remind us of what it means to be human in the sense that Shakespeare was human, and Dante and Quevedo and so many others. Of course, contemporary poets may very well do this, poets like Geoffrey Hill and the Irish poet Thomas Kinsella, to mention just two poets whose names come to mind. But there is something deeply human for me, as I translate, in listening to the voices of the dead across the centuries. Translation can be seen as a kind of resurrection of the dead in the case of poets who have not yet been given a hearing in English. Of course, I am speaking metaphorically.

Classical poets often make use of metre and rhyme. How important is it to keep these in the translation, or do they make the translation sound artificial?
It’s my own personal view that poetry essentially dependent on the effects of metre and rhyme , such as Pushkin’s or Eliot’s Possum poems or Edward Lear’s Nonsense Verse, to give extreme examples, cannot be translated into an English that attempts to replicate the prosody of the original. That’s literary taxidermy. What a translator can do, however, is suggest the prosodic regularity of the original without resorting to paraphrase, which is not translation.

You have joined a distinguished list of translators who have worked with Rosalía. How did the Selected Poems (published by Shearsman Books in 2007) come about?
I have admired the poetry of Rosalía for years. If you don’t mind my saying so, I think you’re wrong about there being a distinguished list of translators. Most of what I’ve come across in English is of poor quality and badly dated. Edwin Morgan’s translations are an exception. He has done some faithful and lively versions. The Shearsman Selected Poems was prompted by what I saw as a need to give Rosalía a voice in English. She has been written about by feminists but my primary concern was Rosalía the poet. As I can only access Galician with the help of Spanish cribs, I was lucky to be given great help with the Galician by two Galician friends, José Manuel Estévez Saá and Margarita Estévez Saá.

Do you have plans to translate any other Galician poets (apart from Ramón Cabanillas for the anthology)?
Not at present. But now that I have discovered Galician poetry through Rosalía, I may find some other Galician poet whose work interests me enough to tempt me to try translating it.

Thank you for talking to us!

Manuel Rivas’ poetry in English

Small Stations Press has just brought out an anthology of eighty poems by Manuel Rivas, From Unknown to Unknown, selected and translated into English by Jonathan Dunne (who translates his prose for Harvill Secker in London and Overlook Press in New York).

The anthology has an introduction by John Burnside, the talented and prolific Scottish writer, which is available to read on the publisher’s website.

Small Stations Press, which publishes in both English and Bulgarian, plans a Bulgarian edition of Rivas’ best-selling novel The Carpenter’s Pencil for autumn 2009.

Michael Smith to translate Ramón Cabanillas

The Irish poet and translator Michael Smith has agreed to translate the poem by Ramón Cabanillas for the bilingual Anthology of Galician Literature to be published by Xerais and Galaxia in 2010.

Michael Smith is best known for his translations of classic Spanish poets, including Francisco de Quevedo and Luis de Góngora. He also recently translated a Selected Poems of Rosalía de Castro for Shearsman Books in Exeter. His work as a translator was recognized when in 2001 he received the European Academy Medal.

Born in Dublin in 1942, Michael founded New Writers Press in 1967, publishing over 70 titles, and was founding editor of the influential literary magazine The Lace Curtain.

His own poetry has appeared in numerous anthologies of Irish poetry, including The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry.

It is a privilege to be able to count on Michael’s presence in the anthology, translating a poem by Ramón Cabanillas that was chosen for this anthology by Arcadio López Casanova.

Next week, there will be a short interview with Michael on this blog!

Galician Literature in English Translation

What books of Galician literature have already been published in English? How many of them are individual titles and how many are anthologies by a single or multiple authors?

The number of books being translated into and out of a language is a sign of how much that language is in dialogue with other cultures and languages, so it’s important to keep track of the books in translation that have been published. The Consello da Cultura Galega produced a list in 2003, and Olga Castro of Vigo University produced another list as an appendix to her paper at the Congress on Plácido Castro and His Time held in November 2005. Vigo University also has a database of literary translations published since 1980.

Here Jonathan Dunne has produced a list of books of Galician literature published in English translation, with links to pages of relevance to each individual publication! Something to celebrate, and also something to work towards…