Recent English Translations of Poetry from Argentina: Contexts and Strategies

Twentieth-century poetry from Spanish America has found some resonance in the anglophone academy, in particular in the USA, where one might think of translations of the work of Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, and Juan Gelman. Its presence in the British academy and the wider anglophone cultural and publishing scene is more limited. In the case of Argentina, the Foreign Ministry’s translation support programme, ‘Sur’ (South), has boosted translation into a number of languages, not least English. Poetry features prominently in the programme, including collections by internationally fêted writers like Borges, as well as those I have called elsewhere ‘semi-canonical’ authors such as Alejandra Pizarnik and Juan Gelman. Contemporary poetry has also been represented, including books by Tamara Kamenszain, Mori Ponsowy, and Ana Becciú, all published by the Waterloo Press in Sussex. From the perspective of Translation Studies, these volumes contribute to a growing number of multiple translations of individual poems. For Borges, even within one collection (The Sonnets) there are two versions, by different translators, of the same text. In the case of Pizarnik, Cecilia Rossi’s work follows that of an earlier translator, Susan Bassnett. And for Juan Gelman, the reader may now compare three different English renditions of some of his poems