The memories from which Fred D'Aguiar translates these poems are cultural and personal, from the anciencies of the Gilgamesh epic to the modern world, from classical philosophy to C.L.R. James and Aime Cesaire, from Asia and Europe to the new world in which their destinies are unpredictably worked out.
D'Aguiar's concluding translations are of Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite, masters and remakers of language and form, from whom (among a multitude of others) he takes his bearings. This unusual integration of tributes and the ironies they provoke give Translations a radical colouring: D'Aguiar is learned; he is also wry, alert to the false notes in history and what follows from them. 'The world map / Turned from red to brown to black / And blue, drained of empire.' And he is passionate, responding always to the deep feelings of others, from desire to love, elegy to celebration.
Sprache
Verlagsort
Verlagsgruppe
Dateigröße
ISBN-13
978-1-78410-607-2 (9781784106072)
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Schweitzer Klassifikation
Fred D'Aguiar was born in London of Guyanese parents, and grew up in Guyana before returning to London for his secondary and tertiary education. He has lived in the US since the mid-90s and currently he is Professor of English at UCLA. He trained as a psychiatric nurse before reading African and Caribbean Studies at the University of Kent, Canterbury. He was Judith E. Wilson Fellow at Cambridge University and has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. For the Unnamed (2023) is Fred D'Aguiar's fifth collection with Carcanet. His previous poetry book, Letters to America was a Poetry Book Society Winter Choice in 2020. Carcanet also published his nonfiction, Year of Plagues (2021).
