BOA Blog

[caption id="attachment_344" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Chad Post, publisher of Open Letter Books"][/caption] On December 25th, the New York Times ran an outstanding article on the translation publisher Open Letter Books (how's that for Christmas present?!). Here at BOA, we take pride in our fellow small publishers' successes: we're all in the trenches together, working to bring great literature into the larger cultural discussion. But we took particular pride in this article because Open Letter Books is located right here in Rochester, NY! Here's a little sample from the article: ROCHESTER — The publishing industry is in a tailspin; translated works account...

[caption id="attachment_340" align="alignleft" width="118" caption="The Boatloads"][/caption] BOA is back from holiday break & ready to zoom into the new year! Wonderful to come back to find a sharp review of The Boatloads from Galatea Resurrects: "With an irreverence bordering on blasphemy ('We want to find a higher intent/ a god to damn'), and a connectedness to the natural world rivaling none, Albergotti’s debut is a charged pastiche of imaginative genius, fiercely broken chips of song, and a strange peacefulness borne of surviving a treacherous journey only to find oneself washed up on foreign, or, with any luck, domestic shores." Read...

The BOA office will be closed for the holidays from Dec. 24 - Jan 4. We will no doubt have all kinds of good news to share with you by the time we're back... In the meantime, on behalf of the staff and board of BOA Editions, we wish you all a lovely, bright, and shiningly poetic 2010!

[caption id="attachment_331" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Charles Simic, BOA translator, with Novica Tadic, BOA author."][/caption] Another smart review from Verse! Follow the below link to read Timothy Henry's insightful review of Dark Things, poems by Novica Tadic, translated from the Serbian by Charles Simic, in which Henry says things like: "In his introduction to Novica Tadic's Dark Things, Charles Simic suggests that the reader of this haunted collection is led by “a nameless recluse, mistrustful and fearful . . . surrounded on all sides by monsters and apparitions generated by his vivid, guilt-ridden imagination.” With the guidance of this recluse, we are...

[caption id="attachment_323" align="alignleft" width="200" caption="The Clean Shirt of It. Poems by Paulo Henriques Britto, translated by Idra Novey."][/caption] Thanks to Idra Novey for this next installment of her guest blog series on poetry and translation! Five Poetry Translation Myths and Five Splendid Quotes to Counter Them For this week’s post on poetry translation, I thought it might be fun to pair some of the most persistent myths about translation with some quotes from my favorite writers and translators and see what they had to say to each other. Here are the results: Myth Number Five: Translation is a passive undertaking....