Translating Neruda

What goes into the translating of a poem? Usually that process gets forgotten once the new poem stands intact in translation. Yet a verse translation derives from historical, biographical, and philosophical research, interpretive analysis of the original poem, and continuous linguistic and prosodic choices that parallel those the poet made. Taking as a text Pablo Neruda's brilliant prophetic sequence Alturas de Macchu Picchu (1945), the author here re-creates the entire process of translation, from his first encounter with the poem to the last shaping of a phrase that may never come right in English. This many-faceted book forms an essay on the theory and practice of literary translation, a study of Neruda's career through 1945, and an interpretation of his major poem, all of which lead to a striking new poem in English, Heights of Macchu Picchu, printed along with the original Spanish. This genesis of a verse translation also includes little-known biographical data, hitherto untranslated poems and prose from the years 1920 to 1945, and new translations of key poems from Neruda's Residence on Earth and Spain in My Heart.

Neruda's lost poems, never before translated, are presented in a Spanish-English edition and illustrated with full-color reproductions of handwritten originals

In this compelling collection, Teresa Longo gathers a diverse group of critical and poetic voices to analyze the politics of packaging and marketing Neruda and Latin American poetry in general in the United States.

New bilingual volume to Copper Canyon's library of Pablo Neruda's late and posthumous work.

Writers, translators, and critics explore the cultural politics and transnational impact of Latin American literature.

In this book-length poem, translated for the first time into English and presented in a bilingual format, Nobel Laureate Neruda composes a "valediction to the Sixties" and confronts a grim disillusionment growing inside him.

The making of a great Chilean poet.

This volume of 'Angles on the English-Speaking World' discusses the intriguing inter-relatedness between the concepts and phenomena of world literature and translation. The term 'worlding', presented by Ástráður Eysteinsson in this collection, is coined by Sarah Lawell in her book Reading World Literature (1994) where it denotes the reader's pleasurable 'reading' of the meeting of 'worlds' in a literary translation -- i.e. the meeting of the different cultural environments embodied in a translation from one language into another. Through such reading, the reader in fact participates in creating true 'world literature'. This is a somewhat unorthodox conception of world literature, conventionally defined as 'great literature' shelved in a majestic, canonical library. In the opening article sparking off the theme of this collection, Eysteinsson asks: "Which text does the concept of world literature refer to? It can hardly allude exclusively to the original, which the majority of the work's readers may never get to know. On the other hand, it hardly refers to the various translations as seen apart from the original. It seems to have a crucial bearing on the border between the two, and on the very idea that the work merits the move across this linguistic and cultural border, to reside in more than two languages". Picking up on this question at issue, all the essays in this collection throw light on the problematic mechanics of cultural encounters when 'reading the world' in literary translation, i.e. in the texts themselves as well as in the ways in which they have become institutionalised as 'world literature'.