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Sunday, October 12, 2008
Email Submissions Accepted Through Wednesday, Oct 15
Though Packingtown Review does not normally accept submissions via email, we will be making an exception as we near the end of our reading period for our inaugural issue. Through October 15 until 11:59pm submissions may be sent as a PDF attachment to: editors@packingtownreview.com.
Packingtown Review cannot accept previously published material. We read submissions year round, and our response time is approximately three months.
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
Call for Scholarly Essays on Genre and Form
What does it mean when poetry and prose are indistinguishable? What is lost - or found - in translation? When literary form is entirely fluid, what is the relationship between art and criticism? Between the creative and the scholarly?
While we are particularly seeking essays that explore the relationships between genre and form in situations where both are indeterminate or unapparent, we are open to scholarly essays that intersect with these questions generally or that explore specific works. Essays might explore the current relevance (or irrelevance) of the aesthetic, the literary, or the rhetorical. The deadline for submission for the first issue is August 30. After that, we will continue reading for our second issue.
Please send up to 8,000 words (or up to 30 pages of double-spaced prose) in accordance with The Chicago Manual of Style to:
Packingtown Review
Department of English, UH 2027 MC 162
University of Illinois at Chicago, 601 S. Morgan
Chicago, IL 60607
For more information, e-mail editors@packingtownreview.com.
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
Critical Response Contest Deadline Extended to August 30
There is still plenty of time to submit your entries to the Packingtown Review Prize for Critical Response! We have extended the deadline until August 30, 2008, and the winners will be announced on September 30, 2008. For more information, and for Paul Hoover's “The Windows (Speech-lit Islands)” awaiting your critique, visit our contest page.
Saturday, March 08, 2008
Featured Response by S.C. Garrett to "Who said poetry is what gets lost in translation?"
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
Saturday, March 08, 2008
Featured Response by Luba V. Zakharov to "Who said poetry is what gets lost in translation?"
Dear Editors,
In an article by Thom Satterlee titled: Thom Satterlee delves into Robert Frosts Views on Translation (Delos, 1996: p. 46-52), Mr. Satterlee discusses how his own search for this quote ("Poetry is what gets lost in translation") led him to:
1) Mark Richardson, ed., Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays (1995) who assured him that this quote doesn't appear in any of Frost's formal prose.
2) Other writers: Kinnell, Leighton, Ramanujan, Nims
3) Translators who suggest that it may have been a remark made at a party or during a class at Bread Loaf.
4) Dartmouth Archives, where Phil Cronenwett, Curator of Manuscripts at Dartmouth suggested that the source could be a published lecture by Louis Untermeyer, one of Frost's longtime friends. In Untermeyer's book titled, Robert Frost: A Backward Look, Untermeyer and Frost are discussing a remark a critic made about Frost's, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." Untermeyer then wrote that Frost's comment was:
"You've often heard me say – perhaps too often – that poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation."
Satterlee goes on to argue how this too, is problematic and cites a variety of sources, including a 1913 essay by Pound ("How I Began,") who says, "I would know what was accounted poetry everyday, what part of poetry was 'indestructible,' what part could not be lost in translation," suggesting that Frost might have borrowed this notion from Pound and he then traces this from Dryden to Dante (translated by R.A. Shoaf):
"And therefore everyone should know that nothing harmonized through a musical bond can be translated from one tongue into another without breaking and destroying all sweetness and harmony."
Thanks to Satterlee for spending over a year trying to get to the source for a conclusion that you can find at the end of his article.
For my part, I would say that perhaps viewing poetry through the lens of music and it's syncopated steps (or sentence sounds) is more accurate than trying to explain translation and all the problematic tendencies that people worry about when language moves against language. In this way, perhaps translation is the act of bringing a sweet sound into whatever different language the translator sends it to, creating a structure we cannot measure except by the 'ah ha' of recognition – the collision of our hearts and minds when 'knowing' transcends translation.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Contest Annoucement
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, January 06, 2008
AWP 2008 (New York, NY)
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.
Sunday, December 02, 2007
Who said poetry is what gets lost in translation? No, really, who said it?
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.
Saturday, September 08, 2007
Call for Submissions
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.
