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!