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One, two! one, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

Un deux, un deux, par le milieu,
Le glaive vorpal fait pat-à-pan!
La bête défaite, avec sa tête,
Il rentre gallomphant.

Eins, Zwei! Eins, Zwei! Und durch und durch
Seins vorpals Schwert zerschniferschnück.
Da blieb es todt! Er, Kopf in Hand,
Geläumfig zog zurück!

The late Victor Proetz was by vocation a visual artist who created many distinguished architectural and decorative designs. His favorite avocation, however, was to explore the possibilities (and impossibilities) of words, especially words in translation, and to share his discoveries. As Alastair Reid says in his foreword, "He turned words over in his head, he listened to them, he unraveled them, he looked them up, he played with them, he passed them on like presents, all with an unjadeable astonishment."

What, Proetz wondered, do some of the familiar and not-so-familiar works of English and American literature sound like in French? In German? "How," he asked, "do you say 'Yankee Doodle' in French—if you can?" And "How do they say 'Hounyhnhnm' and 'Cheshire Cat' and things like that in German?" And, in either language, "How, in God's name, can you possibly say 'There she blows!'?"

This book, unfortunately left incomplete on his death in 1966, contains many of his answers. They are given not only in the assembled texts and translations but also in his wry, curious, sometimes hilarious commentaries. None of it is scholarly in any formal, academic sense—"and yet," Reid reminds us, "his is precisely the kind of enthusiastic curiosity that gives scholarship its pointers."

Mapping contemporary Cuba through the architecture of poetry and place.

Alamar, the home of award-winning Cuban poet Juan Carlos Flores, is the setting for his collection, The Counterpunch and Other Horizontal Poems) / El contragolpe (y otros poemas horizontales). Constructed as a self-help community in eastern Havana, Alamar is the largest housing complex in the world. Flores’s highly structured texts, organized into “art galleries,” present prose paintings of a big place in very small form.

Flores builds a poetic landscape with repeating structures that mirror Alamar’s five-floor walkups. Exploring life and dream on the flat surfaces of the poems, he gives fleeting glimpses of perception and survival at the urban margins. As the poet ages, so ages Alamar itself. Yet both find renewal through poetry.

The eighty poems in this bilingual edition offer the first English translation of a complete Flores collection. It will also be of interest to Spanish-language readers seeking access to Cuban literature abroad. Award-winning scholar and translator Kristin Dykstra has compiled an introduction in which she presents Flores, his literary contexts, and references in his poems. Because Flores made specific requests regarding translation, fascinating notes also clarify and expound on choices Dykstra makes in the English version.

With clear, conversational prose, this is the first book dedicated entirely to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s writings on translation.

Through his many critically acclaimed novels, stories, essays, plays, and memoirs, Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has been at the forefront of world literature for decades. He has also been, in his own words, “a language warrior,” fighting for indigenous African languages to find their rightful place in the literary world. Having begun his writing career in English, Ngũgĩ shifted to writing in his native language Gikũyũ in 1977, a stance both creatively and politically significant. For decades now, Ngũgĩ has been translating his Gikũyũ works into English himself, and he has used many platforms to champion the practice and cause of literary translations, which he calls “the language of languages.”
 
This volume brings together for the first time Ngũgĩ’s essays and lectures about translation, written and delivered over the past two decades. Here we find Ngũgĩ discussing translation as a conversation between cultures, proposing that dialogue among African languages is the way to unify African peoples, reflecting on the complexities of auto-translation or translating one’s own work, exploring the essential task translation performed in the history of the propagation of thought, and pleading for the hierarchy of languages to be torn down. He also shares his many experiences of writing across languages, including his story The Upright Revolution, which has been translated into more than a hundred languages around the globe and is the most widely translated text written by an African author. 

At a time when dialogues between cultures and peoples are more essential than ever, The Language of Languages makes an outspoken case for the value of literature without borders.
 

The first of its kind, The Power of Signed Songs: Deaf Artists, Intercultural Reach, and the Politics of Music Making analyzes musical performances that were translated or created in signed languages. Written by an international team of Deaf community researchers, The Power of Signed Songs explores the politics of music making in the form of signed songs, an often controversial art form in Deaf communities. 

While raising questions about culture, translation, and authorship, signed songs demonstrate forms of Deaf cultural resistance, defy traditional conceptions of music, and draw attention to language diversity and intersectionality within Deaf communities in varied European settings. Drawing on both signed music performances and field research, the authors highlight the unique contributions of signing musical artists from both the UK and Portugal. Signed songs and translations illustrate a wide range of creative performance strategies, linguistic word and sign play across languages, and sociolinguistic variation. 

By analyzing how translated songs created by Deaf artists serve as cultural products, translations, and performance, The Power of Signed Songs provides a glimpse into how translations of music can be a form of both transnational and localized cultural resistance. Ultimately, Deaf-centered signed songs are not just artistic expressions but also political statements, challenging the idea that music belongs exclusively to the hearing world.

Elizabeth Lowe charts her journey to becoming a translator through a series of vignettes relating her life as a “third-culture kid” and living and working abroad in a kaleidoscope of cultures and languages. She lived in Germany as a young child immediately after the Second World War while her father worked in the Nuremberg trials and as a newly married military spouse during the Vietnam War; she lived in Haiti just prior to Papa Doc's consolidation of power, in Brazil when the military dictatorship seized the country in its two-decade vise, at the University of Coimbra, Portugal during Salazar, and Colombia at the height of the guerrilla conflicts, and in Miami during the heyday of the cartels. The book is a reflection on translation as an art, on five decades teaching languages, literatures, and translation, and on her close relationship with writers from the Lusophone world. It explores theoretical aspects of translation as well as practical challenges faced by translators, especially those working in Portuguese literature. Lowe offers intimate insights into the creative process of the writers she translates and her own philosophy of literary translation. 
 

A critical reassessment of the origins and development of translation studies. 

This volume challenges the established historical narratives of “translation studies” by showcasing some of the rich traditions of debate, research, and theory that unfolded around the world in the centuries before the supposed beginnings of the discipline. Bringing together essays from leaders in the field of translation history, Translation Studies before ‘Translation Studies’ decenters the modern-day discipline by giving access to overlooked theoretical reflections, most of them translated into English for the first time, from languages such as Latin, Sanskrit, Chinese, Arabic, Swahili, Ukrainian, French, and Brazilian Portuguese.