Abstract

What is the publisher's role in the dissemination of translations, and how do they encourage readers to see the contextual links between history, politics, poetry, and translation? What dangers and advantages does the poet as translator face? Unlike the scholar-translator, the poet-translator is always a poet, with his own poetry at stake, and sometimes self-taught, with only a modest knowledge of the field entered. Will he impose his poetics on the text he is translating? Has he mastered the foreign language and literature, or should he turn to a translation team? Are graduate degree writing programs too dependent on English-language texts? Should students learn to read a second language well enough to take a translation workshop in that language? This article was originally presented as a paper on the panel 'Poet as Translator: Promethean Risk' at the 2003 Associated Writers Program Conference.

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