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October 16, 2009 6 – 7pm : Packingtown Review Drawing at Jane Addams Hull-House Museum

Donate Now or learn more about the event

• Tags: prizes, donation, drawing

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Packingtown Review Drawing

Posted 11 months ago

Join us at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum on Friday, October 16th, at 6 p.m. Sneza Zabic, Chad Heltzel, Renoir Gaither, and Beatriz Ruiz from the UIC Program for Writers will read from their work. Afterward we will pick the winners for our 2009 Packingtown Review Drawing.

Tickets will be available at the door and soon via this website (Note: you don’t have to present to claim your prize).

Link: Jane Addams Hull-House Museum

• Tags: events, donations, drawing

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Issue #1 - Word Cloud

Posted March 05, 2009

Thanks to the good folks over at Wordle we created a word cloud for our first issue.View a huge version (1660×900).

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Call for Scholarly Essays on Genre and Form

Posted August 05, 2008

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:

For more information, e-mail editors@packingtownreview.com.

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Critical Response Contest Deadline Extended to August 30

Posted May 06, 2008

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.

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Featured Response by S.C. Garrett to "Who said poetry is what gets lost in translation?"

Posted March 08, 2008

Dear Editors,

In answer to your web sites challenge concerning the quote widely attributed to Frost, "Poetry is what gets lost in translation," I couldnt 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

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Featured Response by Luba V. Zakharov to "Who said poetry is what gets lost in translation?"

Posted March 08, 2008

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.

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Contest Annoucement

Posted January 24, 2008

Acclaimed poet and UIC alumnus Paul Hoover has donated his poem "The Windows (Speech-lit Islands)" to Packingtown Reviews critical response contest. Learn more…

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AWP 2008 (New York, NY)

Posted January 06, 2008

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.

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Who said poetry is what gets lost in translation? No, really, who said it?

Posted December 02, 2007

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.

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Call for Submissions

Posted September 08, 2007

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.

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