
Against Translation
Alan Shapiro(Author)
University of Chicago Press
Published on 8. March 2019
Book
Paperback/Softback
96 pages
978-0-226-61350-5 (ISBN)
Description
We often ask ourselves what gets lost in translation--not just between languages, but in the everyday trade-offs between what we experience and what we are able to say about it. But the visionary poems of this collection invite us to consider: what is loss, in translation? Writing at the limits of language--where "the signs loosen, fray, and drift"--Alan Shapiro probes the startling complexity of how we confront absence and the ephemeral, the heartbreak of what once wasn't yet and now is no longer, of what (like racial prejudice and historical atrocity) is omnipresent and elusive. Through poems that are fine-grained and often quiet, Shapiro tells of subtle bereavements: a young boy is shamed for the first time for looking "girly"; an ailing old man struggles to visit his wife in a nursing home; or a woman dying of cancer watches her friends enjoy themselves in her absence. Throughout, this collection traverses rather than condemns the imperfect language of loss--moving against the current in the direction of the utterly ineffable.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Chicago
United States
Publishing group
The University of Chicago Press
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 213 mm
Width: 137 mm
Thickness: 10 mm
Weight
181 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-226-61350-5 (9780226613505)
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Alan Shapiro
Against Translation
E-Book
12/2022
1st Edition
University of Chicago Press
€18.18
Available for download
Person
Alan Shapiro has published many books, including Reel to Reel, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is the William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of English and comparative literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.