Eliot Weinberger | |
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Born | New York City | February 6, 1949
Occupation | Essayist, editor, translator |
Language | English, Spanish |
Notable works |
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Eliot Weinberger (born 6 February 1949 in New York City) is an American writer, essayist, editor, and translator. He is primarily known for his essays and political articles, the former characterized by their wide-ranging subjects and experimental style, verging on a kind of documentary prose poetry, and the latter highly critical of American politics and foreign policy. His work regularly appears in translation and has been published in more than thirty languages.
Weinberger's books of literary writings include Works on Paper, Outside Stories, Written Reaction, Karmic Traces, The Stars, Muhammad, the "serial essay" An Elemental Thing, which was selected by the Village Voice as one of the "20 Best Books of the Year," [1] Oranges & Peanuts for Sale, The Ghosts of Birds, and Angels & Saints, selected for the Times Literary Supplement "International Books of the Year." [2]
His political articles are collected in 9/12, What I Heard About Iraq, and What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award for criticism and also a TLS "International Books of the Year." [3] The Guardian (UK) said of What I Heard About Iraq: "Every war has its classic antiwar book, and here is Iraq’s." [4] It has been adapted by others into a prize-winning theater piece, two cantatas, two prize-winning radio plays, a dance performance, and various art installations; it appeared on some tens of thousands of websites, and was read or performed in nearly one hundred events throughout the world on 20 March 2006, the anniversary of the invasion. When George W. Bush visited Angela Merkel's hometown of Stralsund, Germany, in July 2006, the local residents protested with a public reading of the text. [5] In 2021, Weinberger was awarded the Jeanette Schocken / Bremerhaven Citizens' Prize for Literature, given biannually to a writer who "sets an example against injustice and violence, against hatred and intolerance." In their citation, the jurors wrote: “In the spirit of Enlightenment, Weinberger acts in these texts as an agent provocateur for a better world, as a great warner against the loss of freedom and human dignity." [6] [7]
Weinberger's long collaboration and friendship with the Nobel Prize–winning writer and poet Octavio Paz, which began when Weinberger was a teenager, led to many translations of Paz's work, including The Poems of Octavio Paz, In Light of India, and Sunstone. Among his other translations of Latin American literature are Vicente Huidobro's Altazor, Xavier Villaurrutia's Nostalgia for Death, and Jorge Luis Borges' Seven Nights. His edition of Borges’ Selected Non-Fictions received the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism.
The author of a study of Chinese poetry translation, 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, Weinberger is a translator of the poetry of the poet Bei Dao, and the editor of The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry, also a TLS "International Book of the Year." [8] He is the series editor of Calligrams: Writings from and on China, jointly published by Chinese University of Hong Kong Press and New York Review Books. Among the other books he has edited are the anthologies American Poetry Since 1950: Innovators & Outsiders and World Beat: International Poetry Now from New Directions.
He is a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books and occasional contributor to the New York Review of Books . From 2015 to 2017, he was the literary editor of the Murty Classical Library of India. He serves on the Advisory Boards of the Margellos World Republic of Letters (Yale University Press) and the Board of Directors of New Directions Publishing.
In 2000, Weinberger became the first U.S. literary writer to be awarded the Order of the Aztec Eagle by the government of Mexico. [9] He was chosen by the German organization Dropping Knowledge as one of a hundred "world's most innovative thinkers." At the 2005 PEN World Voices Festival, he was presented as a "Post-National Writer." [10] He lives in New York City.
Weinberger's 2007 article "Mandaeans", published in Harper's Magazine , [11] was sharply criticized by many Mandaeans, as the article described the Mandaeans' allegedly negative views of other religions and ethnic groups. [12]
Octavio Paz Lozano was a Mexican poet and diplomat. For his body of work, he was awarded the 1977 Jerusalem Prize, the 1981 Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the 1982 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature.
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Yehuda Amichai was an Israeli poet and author, one of the first to write in colloquial Hebrew in modern times.
Alfred Charles Tomlinson, CBE was an English poet, translator, academic, and illustrator. He was born in Penkhull, and grew up in Basford, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire.
This is a bibliography of works by Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet, and translator Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986).
New Directions Publishing Corp. is an independent book publishing company that was founded in 1936 by James Laughlin (1914–1997) and incorporated in 1964. Its offices are located at 80 Eighth Avenue in New York City.
Forrest Gander is an American poet, translator, essayist, and novelist. The A.K. Seaver Professor Emeritus of Literary Arts & Comparative Literature at Brown University, Gander won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2019 for Be With and is chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Michael Hofmann is a German-born poet, translator, and critic. The Guardian has described him as "arguably the world's most influential translator of German into English".
Ilya Kaminsky is a USSR-born, Ukrainian-Jewish-American poet, critic, translator and professor. He is best known for his poetry collections Dancing in Odesa and Deaf Republic, which have earned him several awards.
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Richard Berengarten is an English poet. Having lived in Italy, Greece, the US and the former Yugoslavia, his perspectives as a poet combine English, French, Mediterranean, Jewish, Slavic, American and Oriental influences. His poems explore historical and political material, inner worlds and their archetypal resonances, and relationships and everyday life. His work is marked by its multicultural frames of reference, depth of themes, and variety of forms. In the 1970s, he founded and ran the international Cambridge Poetry Festival. He has been an important presence in contemporary poetry for the past 40 years, and his work has been translated into more than 90 languages.
Piedra de Sol ("Sunstone") is the poem written by Octavio Paz in 1957 that helped launch his international reputation. In the presentation speech of his Nobel Prize in 1990, Sunstone was later praised as "one of the high points of Paz's poetry…This suggestive work with its many layers of meaning seems to incorporate, interpret and reconstrue major existential questions, death, time, love and reality".
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Peter Cole is a MacArthur-winning poet and translator who lives in Jerusalem and New Haven. Cole was born in 1957 in Paterson, New Jersey. He attended Williams College and Hampshire College, and moved to Jerusalem in 1981. He has been called "one of the handful of authentic poets of his own American generation" by the critic Harold Bloom. In a 2015 interview in The Paris Review, he described his work as poet and translator as "at heart, the same activity carried out at different points along a spectrum."
Susanna C. Nied is an American writer and translator.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Suzanne Jill Levine is an American writer, poet, literary translator and scholar.
Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei: How a Chinese Poem Is Translated is a 1987 study by the American author Eliot Weinberger, with an addendum written by the Mexican poet Octavio Paz. The work analyzes 19 renditions of the Chinese-language nature poem "Deer Grove", which was originally written by the Tang-era poet Wang Wei (699–759). Weinberger compares translations of the poem into English, French, and Spanish, and analyzes the difficulties that are encountered when translating Chinese poetry. Since its publication, the book has been referred to as an essential work on the subject of translation. An updated edition including additional "ways" was published in 2016.