W.N. Herbert – författare

This volume provides an account of collaborative poetry translation in practice. The book focuses on the ''poettrio'' method as a case study. This process brings together the source-language poet, the target-language poet, and a language advisor serving as a bilingual mediator between the two.

Drawing on data from over 100 hours of recorded footage and interviews, Collaborative Poetry Translation offers both qualitative and quantitative analyses of the method in practice, exploring such issues as poem selection, translation strategies, interaction between participants, and the balancing act between the different cultures at play. A final chapter highlights both the practical and research implications for practices of collaborative translation. This innovative work is situated in an interdisciplinary framework of collaborative translation, poetry translation, poetry and creative writing, and it addresses concerns ranging from the ethnography of collaboration to contemporary publishing practice.

It will be of interest to students, scholars, and specialists in translation studies, comparative literature, literary studies, and creative writing, as well as creative practitioners.

This volume provides an account of collaborative poetry translation in practice. The book focuses on the ''poettrio'' method as a case study. This process brings together the source-language poet, the target-language poet, and a language advisor serving as a bilingual mediator between the two.

Drawing on data from over 100 hours of recorded footage and interviews, Collaborative Poetry Translation offers both qualitative and quantitative analyses of the method in practice, exploring such issues as poem selection, translation strategies, interaction between participants, and the balancing act between the different cultures at play. A final chapter highlights both the practical and research implications for practices of collaborative translation. This innovative work is situated in an interdisciplinary framework of collaborative translation, poetry translation, poetry and creative writing, and it addresses concerns ranging from the ethnography of collaboration to contemporary publishing practice.

It will be of interest to students, scholars, and specialists in translation studies, comparative literature, literary studies, and creative writing, as well as creative practitioners.

Being appointed Dundee Makar (or City Laureate) implied that Bill Herbert might settle into middle age. He rented a flat overlooking Broughty Ferry harbour to write about his home town in both its native tongues. Then within six months his much-loved father died, and that civic idyll was thrown into crisis. Personal and political roles collided as referenda for Scottish independence and EU membership, then the US elections, signalled that the post-war liberal value system was very much in crisis. This is his Dundonian Book of the Dead, in which he explores both his own grief and the encroachment of a new intolerance. His town’s defining modern disaster – the loss in 1959 of the lifeboat Mona with all hands – becomes a symbol for a world turned upside down. But while patriarchy flounders in a storm of its own undoing, his absurd alter ego, William McGonagall, brings his unique tragedian’s eye to bear on both the city’s and our society’s efforts to right itself. The comic and the tragic become catastrophe’s flotsam and jetsam, and the image of the overturned boat is reflected in the very structure of this book, with a keel-hauling of Dundee Doldrums for its climax – poems which resist any stasis of the imagination. The crew of this latter-day Ship of Fools include Captain Beefheart, the cannibal clan of the Denfiends, and a lion, while the passenger list features the surrealist Leonora Carrington, various Jesuses, and the ghastly Imperator Trumpo. Its voyages to alternative futures and pasts echo those of Herbert’s merchantman father, while, in a manner that matches Bill Senior’s later trade of precision engineer, it fits together a dynamic range of forms with an intense focus on the metamorphic and redemptive energies of language.

Poetry has never been so rigorous and diverse, nor has its audience been so numerous and engaged. Strong words? Not if the poets are right. As Ezra Pound wrote: ‘You would think that anyone wanting to know about poetry would go to someone who knew something about it.’ That’s exactly what Bloodaxe has done with this judicious and comprehensive selection of British, Irish and American manifestos by some of modern poetry’s finest practitioners.

Opening the 20th century account with Ezra Pound, W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot, the book moves through key later figures including W.H. Auden, Ted Hughes, Stevie Smith and Dylan Thomas. America is richly represented too, from Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams to the influential New England poets Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath.Strong Words then brings the issues fully up to date with over 30 specially commissioned statements from contemporary writers including Seamus Heaney, Andrew Motion, Simon Armitage, Selima Hill, Paul Muldoon and Douglas Dunn, amounting to a new overview of the poetry being written at the start of the 21st century.For poets and readers, for critics, teachers and students of creative writing and contemporary poetry, this is essential reading. As well as representing many of the most important poets of the last hundred years, Strong Words also charts many different stances and movements, from Modernism to Postmodernism and beyond. This landmark book champions the continuing dialogue of these voices, past and present, exploring the strongest form that words can take: the poem.