Living Tradition: Clare Cavanagh Talks About The Joys and Challenges of Translation

Living Tradition: Clare Cavanagh Talks About The Joys and Challenges of Translation
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Growing up in the San Francisco Bay area, Clare Cavanagh had no exposure to the Polish language. In graduate school, she says, she decided to take a class in Polish only because "it was a department requirement." There, her career as one of the premier Polish-to-English translators began. Earlier this year, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt published Map: Collected and Last Poems, by Nobel Prize-winner Wisława Szymborska, who passed away in 2012. Cavanagh, who translated Szymborska's poetry for more than three decades, edited the volume. She spoke with the Poetry Foundation recently about the benefits of lengthy collaborations and how manners were instrumental to Szymborska's work.

Read the full interview on the Poetry Foundation website.

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