Early fall marks a time of celebration for translations, translators, and the wealth of languages. August is Women in Translation Month, followed by September’s National Translation Month. Wrapping up September is International Translation Day, a holiday established by the United Nations General Assembly in 2017.
International Translation Day lands on September 30, celebrating the feast of St. Jerome, the patron saint of translators and the priest credited with translating much of the Bible into Latin. The word “translation” itself stems from French and classical Latin, etymons of which are defined as the “action of moving a thing from one place to another,” or “transfer of property or rights from one person to another,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Language is a gift; Translation is the act of giving that gift.
Bucknell University Press’ history of publishing literature in translation is as rich as it is extensive. Founded in 1968, BUP publishes work in the arts, humanities and humanistic social sciences with concentrations in Latin American literary studies, Iberian cultural studies, contemporary Irish literature and interdisciplinary eighteenth-century studies. This year, Bucknell University Press aims to highlight just a few of our many titles in translation.
The Essential Poetry of Bohdan Ihor Antonych: Ecstasies and Elegies
By Bohdan Ihor Antonych
Translated by Michael M. Naydan
Lemko-Ukrainian poet Bohdan Ihor Antonych (1909-37) is not as well-known as Slavic modernist poets Mandelstam, Pasternak, and Milosz, or their Western European counterparts Eliot, Rilke, and Lorca, but he unquestionably should be. Sometimes compared to Walt Whitman and Dylan Thomas, Antonych, who described himself as “an ecstatic pagan, a poet of the high of spring,” created during his brief lifetime powerful and innovative poetry with astonishing metaphorical constructions. Born in the Lemko region of Poland, Antonych adopted Ukrainian as his literary language when he moved to Lviv, and virtually transformed the Ukrainian poetic landscape. This essential collection introduces Antonych’s work to new audiences, and includes a biographical sketch by the translator and a comprehensive introduction by Lidia Stefanowska, one of the world’s leading experts on this remarkable poet.
MICHAEL M. NAYDAN is the Woskob Family Professor of Ukrainian Studies at The Pennsylvania State University in State College. He is the translator or co-translator of over 40 books, including Zelensky: A Biography, with Alla Perminova.
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The Last Judgement of Kings / Le Jugement dernier des rois: A Bilingual Edition
By Sylvain Maréchal
Edited and Translated by Yann Robert
First performed the day after Marie-Antoinette’s beheading, Le Jugement dernier des rois stages the burlesque trial of the remaining kings and queens of Europe—paraded in chains like animals, made to brawl over a barrel of crackers, and finally obliterated by a spectacular volcanic eruption. Such is the shocking context—at once tragic and farcical—of the most infamous play of the French Revolution, familiar to all specialists of the period. Until now, however, no standalone critical edition or English translation of this historic play existed. This bilingual edition revives Maréchal’s play and reveals its centrality to scholarly debates about Revolutionary notions of justice, religion, commemoration, comedy, and propaganda. Provocative, written in accessible prose, and short—perfect for students in a French or history seminar—Le Jugement dernier des rois offers an ideal introduction to the most important and contentious questions of the Revolutionary period.
YANN ROBERT is an associate professor in the Department of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. He is the author of Dramatic Justice: Trial by Theater in the Age of the French Revolution and, with Mark Darlow, of a critical edition of the revolutionary play L’Ami des lois.
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Contemporary Francophone African Plays: An Anthology
Translated by Judith G. Miller (Editor), Amelia Parenteau, Ninon Vessier, Subha Xavier
Bringing together in English translation eleven Francophone African plays dating from 1970 to 2021, this essential collection includes satirical portraits of colonizers and their collaborators (Bernard Dadié’s Béatrice du Congo; Sony Labou Tansi’s I, Undersigned, Cardiac Case; Sénouvo Agbota Zinsou’s We’re Just Playing) alongside contemporary works questioning diasporic identity and cultural connections (Koffi Kwahulé’s SAMO: A Tribute to Basquiat and Penda Diouf’s Tracks, Trails, and Traces…). The anthology memorializes the Rwandan genocide (Yolande Mukagasana’s testimony from Rwanda 94), questions the status of women in entrenched patriarchy (Werewere Liking’s Singuè Mura: Given That a Woman…), and follows the life of Elizabeth Nietzsche, who perverted her brother’s thought to colonize Paraguay (José Pliya’s The Sister of Zarathustra). Gustave Akakpo’s The True Story of Little Red Riding Hood and Kossi Efoui’s The Conference of the Dogs offer parables about what makes life livable, while Kangni Alem’s The Landing shows the dangers of believing in a better life, through migration, outside of Africa.
JUDITH G. MILLER is an emerita professor of French at New York University. She has published over thirty translations of plays, essays, and novels, most recently The Théâtre du Soleil, the First Fifty-Five Years by Béatrice Picon-Vallin and And the Whole World Quakes: Chronicle of a Slaughter Foretold, a play by Haitian author Guy Régis Jr., in New Plays from the Caribbean, ed. Stéphanie Bérard.
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“The White Horse” and Other Stories
By Emilia Pardo Bazán
Translated by Robert M. Fedorchek
Spanish writer, intellectual, and feminist Emilia Pardo Bazán (1851–1921) was a master of the short form and practitioner of the style that became known as naturalism. This collection gathers twenty-seven of her stories in English translation, revealing the narrative complexity, keen psychological insight, and careful attention to realistic detail that was characteristic of her work. The highly symbolic titular story, “The White Horse,” qualified Pardo Bazán as the godmother of the Generation of ’98, the group of writers who exhorted Spain to rid itself of inertia and fixation on past glories. Influenced by the work of Guy de Maupassant and Émile Zola, Pardo Bazán’s themes are fear, love, hatred, forgiveness, cruelty, repentance, homesickness, and madness—that is, naked reality as experienced across social strata in her time.
ROBERT M. FEDORCHEK was a professor of modern languages and literatures at Fairfield University in Fairfield, Connecticut. He is the translator of ten other books from Bucknell University Press.
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Beginning and End of the Snow / Début et Fin de la Neige
By Yves Bonnefoy
Translated by Emily Grosholz
Yves Bonnefoy’s book of poems, Beginning and End of the Snow followed by Where the Arrow Falls, combines two meditations in which the poet’s thoughts and a landscape reflect each other. In the first, the wintry New England landscape he encountered while teaching at Williams College evokes the dance of atoms in the philosophical poem of Lucretius as well as the Christian doctrine of death and resurrection. In the second, Bonnefoy uses the luminous woods of Haute Provence as the setting for a parable of losing one’s way.
EMILY GROSHOLZ is Liberal Arts Research Professor of Philosophy at the Pennsylvania State University, and a member of the research group REHELS / SPHERE at the University of Paris Denis Diderot. She is the author of six books of poetry (including Leaves / Feuilles with Farhad Ostovani) and an advisory editor for the Hudson Review.
Hainteny: The Traditional Poetry of Madagascar
Translated by Leonard Fox
Hainteny: The Traditional Poetry of Madagascar constitutes the first translation into English of a large and representative collection of the quintessential form of Malagasy poetic creativity, offering the Malagasy text and the English translation on facing pages. The 457 poems are presented in two major sections, love and life, and within each section there is a further subdivision by subject. Although most hainteny deal with love in all its aspects, many also treat such matters as good and evil, wisdom and foolishness, parents and children, poverty and wealth, pride, mockery, and humor, prayers and imprecations, war, and death. Leonard Fox’s introduction, appendix, notes, and glossary enrich the volume, rendering the poems still more accessible to the English-speaking reader.
LEONARD FOX is a professional translator who is a Georgian language specialist in Munich.
To explore more of our translated titles, or other books published by Bucknell University Press, please visit our website.