Translation Workshop with Michael Schmidt

The Instituto Cervantes in Manchester invites you to join a literary translation workshop from Spanish into English, led by the literary translator Michael Schmidt. We are especially delighted to welcome him on this occasion. Working with a poem by Ramón López Velarde (México, 1888-1921), the session will explore the challenges and nuances of poetic translation.

"It is a real challenge to translate the social and period tone of a poem that moves you: the otherness of the language you’re translating from becomes even more other when it comes to bringing over feeling. The host language has to stretch and expand to accommodate the rhythms, diction and even the climate and geography of the poem it is coaxing over the linguistic line; and hardest of all in this poem are the tone of the narrator and the answering tone of the subject, or the object, of his attention." (Michael Schmidt)

Michael Schmidt was born and raised in Mexico. He is a founder and general editor of the magazine PN Review and founder and editorial director of Carcanet Press Ltd, author of Lives of the Poets, Lives of the First Poets, The Novel: a biography, and Gilgamesh: the life of a Poem. He has edited several anthologies, and his Collected Poems was published in 2009. His translations include On Poets and Others by Octavio Paz and, with Ed Kissam, Poems of the Aztec People.