Amelia Glaser: Translating Contemporary World Poetry

Amelia Glaser: Translating Contemporary World Poetry

Dina Famin


In the interest of looking at how translators approach their work, below is a summary of what Glaser said about translation, untranslatability (a beloved cliché), and metaphors of the craft.

  • On the irony of trends of which works get translated: “the least translated things are the things that teach us the most”
  • On untranslatability and the process of translation: “the beauty of translation is that we have a limit”
  • What translation is: “an approximation of understanding”
  • The role of translators in contemporary literature: “by posing [questions about translation in her poetry, Iya Kiva] is allowing translators to be part of this phenomenon of war poetry”
  • The relationship between poetry and metaphoric language: “to allow gaps [in understanding and experience] to remain, but to try to understand [anyway]”

Glaser’s introductions to Iya Kiva, Halyna Kruk, and the poets she translated on LitHub aimed to contextualize the historical, linguistic, and sociocultural relationship between Ukraine and Russia for international readers, and comment on the individual poets’ styles as they responded (and continue to respond) to the war. Her commentary to the actual translation process is slim: a single page in the back of the book describing the writer/editor relationship between herself and Yuliya Ilchuk and their writer.

In our lunchtime conversation, Glaser mentioned that she finds prose much harder to translate than poetry (wild). Part of it, she said (if I may crudely paraphrase), is that readers are much pickier about “accuracy” (whatever that means) when it comes to prose. Since poetry is itself a distancing genre that approximates language for experience (a point which began her presentation), the translator as reader is not stumbling as clumsily as the prose translator.

Glaser’s academic work on poetry and the power of metaphors and literary empathy inform her translations because she has studied how literature traveled and disseminated in past generations. The poetry archive is a tool to document that phenomenon in real-time.

Some scholars draw a divide between the academic and the translator (Eliot Weinberger’s disparaging comments come to mind), but Glaser proves this not to be the case, and in fact makes a contrary case that the effective translator is one who studies not only the global place and role of the work they engage with, but their own position in that network of living literature that will one day be cemented in the (or a) world literature canon.

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