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"facing pages"


I am the Series Editor of "Facing Pages", an on-going set of poetry translations published by Princeton University Press. Each book in the series contains both an original text and a translated text, printed opposite each other, or face-to-face.

The premise underlying "Facing Pages" is simple. These translations of non-Anglophone poets' work will be done by important contemporary English-language writers — usually poets but not always —, that is to say, by authors who are known in their own right and not first and foremost as professional translators. The translator returns the gaze of the translatee as an equal. Each of the resulting books is intended to be a simultaneous event in two œuvres — the original writer's and the translator's. There is no obligation or pressure to be literal or non-literal in the usual sense of the terms in this context. Each translation can be as "faithful" or as creatively "faithless" as the individual author-translator wishes.


Titles published in the "Facing Pages" series to date:

Jaime Saenz, The Night, trans. Forrest Gander and Kent Johnson, with an afterword by Luis H. Antezana (2007)

After Every War: Twentieth-Century Women Poets, trans. from the German by Eavan Boland (2004)

Landscape with Rowers: Poetry from the Netherlands, trans. J. M. Coetzee (2003)

Maurice Maeterlinck, Hothouses: Poems, 1889, trans. Richard Howard (2003)

Horace, The Odes: New Translations by Contemporary Poets, ed. J. D. McClatchy (2002)


Forthcoming titles include:

The Poems of Alda Merini, trans. Susan Stewart (Feb. 2009)

The Poems of Milan Djordjevic, trans. Charles Simic

The Poems of Gunter Eich, trans. Michael Hofmann