Richard Gwyn

Poems for staying at home (Day 13)

    Today’s poem concerns a house, any house – though this one happens to be in Mexico – in which someone is born, but no longer lives. We all have a house to which we return in… Read More

Ten ground rules for microfiction

Since I am currently teaching a course on microfiction, that weird mutating gene/genre that swerves and sways between the prose poem and the short story, I thought I would post a translation of some points made by Andrés… Read More

Leaving the Atocha Station and the personality of the translator

  Someone bought me, or recommended that I buy – I forget precisely – Ben Lerner’s novel Leaving the Atocha Station, and it’s been a long time since I laughed so much while reading any book; so thanks, whoever… Read More

Reasons for his Absence

  Reasons for his Absence by Darío Jaramillo Agudelo (Colombia)   If anyone asks after him, tell them that perhaps he’ll never come back, or else on returning no one will recognise his face; tell them also that he… Read More

Fiction Fiesta, reality, and Alastair Reid

The first Borges story I ever read was ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, in the translation by Alastair Reid, while living in a derelict shepherd’s hut on a Cretan hillside. A couple of years later, like so many others… Read More

No ideas but in things

Since I began teaching creative writing, some fifteen years ago, I have become accustomed to the sad refrain from younger writers that although they fervently wish to write – or perhaps ‘become a writer’, which may or may… Read More

More notes on being a foreigner (I)

Staying for any extended period of time in a country where one is obliged to speak a language other than one’s own inevitably results in reflection about core identity. Core identity, if there is such a thing, presumes… Read More

Life as an act of translation

Many and varied are the approaches to translation, and numerous its unsought consequences. There are those who become obsessed by the process even at the cost of progressing to the end of a piece of work. It doesn’t… Read More

An inexplicable addiction

A joy to find this passage in the Freelance slot of last week’s TLS, written by the wonderful Lydia Davis: “In spite of having translated during most of my life, I still don’t really understand the urge. Why… Read More

Poets who translate

  It is our last day in Istanbul, and the rain continues, as it has done since Friday evening, shrouding the Bosphorous in grey mist. Before catching a taxi to the airport we snatch a visit to Aghia… Read More

Two poems by Claribel Alegría

Claribel Alegría, who was born in Nicaragua in 1924, but raised in El Salvador, beginning a life of exile that included Chile, Mexico, Paris and the island of Mallorca, is a poet heavily influenced by the revolutionary struggles… Read More

On Translation

An email from my Chinese translator in quite extraordinary English reminded me of the following article, brought to my attention by my friend Hugo Pooley last year. It is the report of a corrida that appeared in the… Read More