Most Viewed Posts
Saturday, September 08, 2007
Call for Submissions
Viewed 1229 times
University of Illinois at Chicago journal Packingtown Review invites submissions for its inaugural issue to be released in November 2008. We welcome submissions of poetry, scholarly articles, drama, creative nonfiction, fiction, and literary translation, as well as genre-bending pieces. For more information, please view our submission guidelines.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Contest Annoucement
Viewed 362 times
Acclaimed poet and UIC alumnus Paul Hoover has donated his poem "The Windows (Speech-lit Islands)" to Packingtown Review’s critical response contest. Learn more…
Sunday, December 02, 2007
Who said poetry is what gets lost in translation? No, really, who said it?
Viewed 322 times
Out of curiosity, I decided to look up the exact source of the Robert Frost quote-turned-cliché "Poetry is what gets lost in translation." My Google search yielded 666 different pages containing the quote. My JSTOR search yielded only 11 references of the entire quote, but it's significant that not only the resulting Google sites, but also the scholarly articles in JSTOR, never say when and where Frost was first heard saying those words. Is it an apocryphal quote? It's interesting that precisely the scholarly articles often omit the author of the above cliché – as if when the writers couldn't find the source, they decided to mention the quote as if it was a proverb. In any case, deep cultural anxiety about foreignness (shall I say xenophobia) lurks behind Frost's maxim and its wide-spreadedness. (For the record, Packingtown Review is anti-cliché, anti-anxiety, and pro-translation.) If anyone comes up with a clever counter-maxim to the Frostian cliché, send it to us and we'll feature it on our web site.
Sunday, January 06, 2008
AWP 2008 (New York, NY)
Viewed 320 times
Stop by the Packingtown Review table at the AWP Bookfair in NYC (January 30 – February 2). We are assigned table # 513 in “Americas Hall II” at the Hilton, which you can access from the third floor. Editors and staff will be there to answer questions and chat. Check out the conference here.
Saturday, March 08, 2008
Featured Response by S.C. Garrett to "Who said poetry is what gets lost in translation?"
Viewed 198 times
Dear Editors,
In answer to your web site’s challenge concerning the quote widely attributed to Frost, "Poetry is what gets lost in translation," I couldn’t help but send you an answer to this famous maxim I happened to write about two years ago:
Correction
Lost poetry
is what translation
gets in.
I, too, find the quote oddly fearful of a lack of artful commerce between languages (especially concerning the widely available range of excellent translations of poetry into and out of English) and wrote this as a rebuttal.
Sincerely,
S.C. Garrett
