AzonaL

Poetry in translation

Abd al-Karim Al-Ahmad

Abd al-Karim Al-Ahmad is an author from Syria currently living in Germany. He writes poetry, stories, and social blogs, and has published a number of pieces in international literary magazines and on websites translated to different languages such as English, French, and Dutch. He won an Ossi Di Seppia International Poetry Award as best foreign author in the category of poetry.

Catherine Cobham

Catherine Cobham taught Arabic language and literature at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland for many years and has translated the work of a number of Arab writers, including poetry by Adonis, Mahmoud Darwish, Ghayath Almadhoun, and Tammam Hunaidy, and novels and short stories by Yusuf Idris, Naguib Mahfouz, Hanan al-Shaykh, and Fuad al-Takarli. She has written articles in academic journals and co-written with Fabio Caiani The Iraqi Novel: Key Writers, Key Texts (Edinburgh University Press, 2013).

A. Louise Cole

A. Louise Cole is a prose writer and translator of Spanish and Latin poetry and prose. She earned an MA in Spanish from Middlebury College and a PhD in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies and MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Arkansas.

Maria da Cunha

Maria da Cunha (October 19, 1872 – January 10, 1917) was born in Lisbon to a well-to-do family with a Brazilian mother and Spanish father. Da Cunha became a poet and journalist. Her first book of poems was released in 1909, with a preface written by Júlio Dantas that boosted sales; a new edition with added poems was released in 1911. Her second volume, O Livro da Noite, was released in 1915. Her lover, Virgínia Quaresma, was one of the first Portuguese people to be openly gay. There’s some speculation that their move to Brazil (da Cunha had a teaching job, and Quaresma wrote for a periodical) was influenced by a desire for anonymity and to escape a homophobic environment. Da Cunha’s sudden death saw Quaresma return to Portugal and a bright talent gone too soon.

Viviana De Cecco

Viviana De Cecco is an Italian translator, language teacher, and writer. Since 2013 she has published novels, short stories, and poems and she has won national and international literary contests. Her flash fiction piece “The Vampire Moth” recently appeared in Grim & Gilded (Issue 9). She has written book reviews for Tint Journal, an international online literary journal dedicated to English Second Language authors; worked as French Poetry Translator in Montpellier for a writing workshop; and has published poems in the anthologies of English Poets’ Choice. Over time, she has translated into Italian different short stories by French and English classical authors. She loves the poems of the twentieth century such as those of Amalia Guglielminetti here translated for AzonaL. She also loves watching movies, listening to rock music, walking by the sea, and visiting mysterious places. You can find her short stories and articles on her blog: https://vivianadececco.altervista.org/.

María Leticia del Toro García

María Leticia del Toro García got her PhD cum laude at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. She is the author of the first monograph on Susan Howe written in Spanish language and published by the University of Valladolid: Intertextualidad, Experimentación e Historia en la Obra de Susan Howe (Intertextuality, Experimentation, and History in the Work of Susan Howe). Her field of interests revolves around literature, especially the contemporary. She has taken part in the YEATS Reborn Project with a translation of his poem “The Stolen Child” into Spanish. She is also author of several articles, both in Spanish and English, such as: “Una proyección literaria en clave histórica de la América colonial” (A Literary Projection in a Historical Key of Colonial America), “Representaciones de la figura de Carlos I de Inglaterra en la Literatura Contemporánea: Teatralidad y Santidad” (Representations of the figure of Carlos I of England in Contemporary Literature: Theatricality and Saintliness), “La búsqueda de la identidad en la literatura contemporánea: el ejemplo de Susan Howe” (The Search for Identity in Contemporary Literature: The Example of Susan Howe), “Dando voz al silencio: la figura femenina en la poesía de Susan Howe” (Giving Voice to the Silence: The Female Figure in the Poetry of Susan Howe), “Susan Howe and the Difficulty of Printing Art in Printed Form,” “Mirroring: two visions, one reality,” and “Susan Howe’s Federalist 10: a Literary Approach to Colonial America.” At present, she is researching in the field of feminine writing both in the United States and in China.

Dorota Filipczak

Dorota Filipczak (1963 – 2021) was Head of the Department of Intermedial, Canadian and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Łódz, Poland. She was highly acclaimed for her scholarship on Canadian literature, feminist philosophy of religion, and postcolonial literature. She was a founding editor of Text Matters: Journal of Literature, Theory, and Culture (2011). Apart from her two major books, “The Valley of the Shadow of Death”: Biblical Intertext in Malcolm Lowry’s Fiction and Unheroic Heroines: The Portrayal of Women in the Writings of Margaret Laurence, her critical work encompassed several edited volumes and numerous critical articles. She authored six volumes of poetry, characterized by a combination of emotional subtlety and intense sensuality as well as an interweaving of stark realism and spiritual immediacy, including W cieniu doskonałej pomarańczy (In the Shadow of a Perfect Orange) (1994), Trzecie skrzydło anioła (The Third Wing of an Angel) (1995), and Wieloświat (Multiverse) (2016).

Amalia Guglielminetti

Amalia Guglielminetti was born in Turin in 1881 and, after the death of her father, grew up with two sisters and a brother in the home of her grandfather, an authoritarian and strict industrialist. There is no definite information about her mother, but she seems to have been rather absent and never involved in Amalia’s education. After studying at religious schools, Amalia began writing poetry for the newspaper Gazzetta del Popolo in 1903, but was most appreciated when she published her first volume of poems Le vergini folli (The Insane Virgins). After the publication of this book she met the famous crepuscular poet Guido Gozzano, who soon became her lover. Her later collections of poems, like Le seduzioni (The Seductions), caused a scandal in the respectable society of the time because they described modern, nonconformist, and rebellious women. However, Amalia also dealt with themes such as loneliness, grief, and love in her poetry collections. When she and Gozzano broke up, Amalia intertwined with writer and journalist Dino Segre in a troubled relationship, which even led to her being sued for libel. She moved to Rome but failed to pursue a career as a journalist. She died alone in 1941 from septicemia.

Wolfgang Hermann

Wolfgang Hermann is an Austrian novelist, poet, and playwright. Born in Bregenz, Austria, he studied philosophy in Vienna, after which he traveled extensively and lived in Berlin, Paris, Aix en Provence, and Tokyo. Since 1988, Hermann has published numerous books of prose, most notably Abschied ohne Ende (Farewell Without End), Herr Faustini bekommt Besuch (Herr Faustini Gets a Visit), Insel im Sommer (Island in Summer), Bildnis meiner Mutter (Portrait of My Mother), and poetry, Ins Tagesinnere (To the Heart of Day) and Schatten auf dem Weg durch den Bernsteinwald (Shadows on the Way Through the Amber Forest). His poems have often been set to music, for instance, by Johanna Doderer and Peter Madsen, and his works have been translated into many languages, including English (Herr Faustini verreist (Herr Faustini Takes a Trip) and Paris Berlin New York. Die Farbe der Stadt (Paris Berlin New York. The Color of the City). He has also won several prominent awards, including the Siemens Literature Prize in 2002, the Anton Wildgans Prize in 2006, and the Austrian State Prize in 2007.

Małgorzata Hołda

Małgorzata Hołda is Assistant Professor in the Department of British Literature and Culture at the University of Łódz, Poland. Her published work explores topics within the modern and postmodern novel, philological and philosophical hermeneutics (with special emphasis on Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of the self as l’homme capable and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics), aesthetics, phenomenology, and postmodern philosophy. She is the author of On Beauty and Being: Hans-Georg Gadamer’s and Virginia Woolf’s Hermeneutics of the Beautiful (2021) and Paul Ricoeur’s Concept of Subjectivity and the Postmodern Claim of the Death of the Subject (2018). Senior Associate Fellow of the International Institute for Hermeneutics and member of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, she is a thematic editor of Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture.

Florencia Horvath

Hungarian poet Florencia Horvath was born in Celldomolk in 2002. She is a recipient of the Zsigmond Moricz Literary Grant. Her poems have been published in most of the major literary magazines and journals in Hungary. Her poem had a special mention in the Quasimodo Poetry Competition. She leads a literary talk show series.

Olena Jennings

Olena Jennings is the author of the poetry collection The Age of Secrets (Lost Horse Press, 2022) and the chapbook Memory Project (2018.) Her novel Temporary Shelter was released in 2021 from Cervena Barva Press. Her translation from Ukrainian of Vasyl Makhno’s collection Paper Bridge was released in October 2022 from Plamen Press and her translation with Oksana Lutsyshyna of Kateryna Kalytko’s collection Nobody Knows Us Here, and We Don’t Know Anyone was released from Lost Horse Press. Her textile art has been shown at Bliss on Bliss Art Projects and the NYC Poetry Festival. She is the founder and curator of the Poets of Queens reading series and press.

Allan Johnston

Originally from southern California, Allan Johnston earned his MA in Creative Writing and his PhD in English from the University of California, Davis. His poems have appeared in over sixty journals, including Poetry, Poetry East, Rattle, and Rhino. He has published three full-length poetry collections (Tasks of Survival, 1996; In a Window, 2018; and Sable and Selected Poems, 2022) and three chapbooks (Northport, 2010; Departures, 2013; and Contingencies, 2015), and has received an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, Pushcart Prize nominations (2009 and 2016), and the First Prize in Poetry in the Outrider Press Literary Anthology competition (2010). His translations and co-translations of poems from the French and German have appeared in Ezra, Metamorphosis, and Transference. He teaches writing and literature at Columbia College and DePaul University in Chicago. He reads or has read for Word River, r.kv.r.y, and the Illinois Emerging Poets competition, and is co-editor of JPSE: Journal for the Philosophical Study of Education. His scholarly articles have appeared in Twentieth Century Literature, College Literature, and several other journals.

Guillemette Johnston

Guillemette Johnston is a professor of French at DePaul University. As well as being a specialist in Rousseau and the French Enlightenment, she also teaches broadly in the areas of French and Francophone literature, as well as Liberal Studies Program focal point courses on the psychology of fairy tales and DEI sophomore seminars on Race, Power, and Resistance. She has lived in the French West Indies and Algeria, and has authored a monograph on Frantz Fanon that appeared in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Francophone courses she has taught include sections on Islam and France, Haiti, the shattering of identity by immigration and colonialism, French Canadian literature, the problem of identity in the French West Indies, and Maghrebi novels of childhood. She is co-editor of JPSE: Journal for the Philosophical Study of Education, and a co-translator (with Allan Johnston) of poems published in Metamorphoses, Ezra, Transference, and Milles Feuilles. She is the author of Lectures poétiques: La Représentation poétique du discours théorique chez Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1996) and has published scholarly articles in Romanic Review, French Forum, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, Pensée libre, Études Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the MLA Approaches to Teaching series, and elsewhere.

Jakub Kornhauser

Jakub Kornhauser was born in 1984. A Polish poet, essayist, and translator, he was the son of the poet Julian Kornhauser, representative of the New Wave poetry movement. He holds a PhD degree and is one of the co-founders of the Centre for Avant-Garde Studies in the Jagiellonian University’s Department of Polish Studies. He conducts research on the literature of Romanesque countries and is particularly interested in avant-garde literature, including experimental literature. He is the author of many translations from Romanian, Serbian, and French and occasionally translates from English and German. He is the editor of several periodicals and editorial series and author of more than a dozen works, including seven volumes of poetry and one book of prose. In 2016, he won the Wisława Szymborska Award for the poetry volume entitled Drożdżownia (The Yeast Factory). In 2021 he was nominated for the Gdynia Literary Prize for the book Premie górskie najwyższej kategorii (Mountain Climbs of the Highest Category). Jakub is also interested in art criticism and enjoys cycling, hiking in the mountains, and long walks. He lives in Cracow.

Abdellatif Laâbi

Abdellatif Laâbi is a poet, novelist, playwright, translator, and political activist. He was born in Fez, Morocco, in 1942. In the 1960s, Laâbi was the founding editor of Souffles, a widely influential French and Arabic literary review that was banned in 1972, at which point Laâbi was imprisoned for eight and a half years. He now lives in exile in France. Laâbi’s most recent accolades include the Prix Goncourt de la Poésie for his Oeuvres complètes (Collected works) in 2009 and the Académie Française’s Grand Prix de la Francophonie in 2011. His work has been translated into Arabic, Spanish, German, Italian, Dutch, Turkish and English. Laâbi himself has translated into French the works of Mahmoud Darwish, Abdul Wahab al-Bayati, Mohammed Al-Maghout, Saâdi Youssef, Abdallah Zrika, Ghassan Kanafani, and Qassim Haddad.

Roman Leibov

Roman Leibov, associate professor at the University of Tartu (Estonia), was born in 1963 in Kiev, Ukraine, to a family of Jewish origin and writes in Russian. He is the author of several books and dozens of articles on the history of Russian literature of the 19th and 20th centuries (see: https://ut-ee.academia.edu/RomanLeibov). In 2012 he published the children’s story Разделить на сто (To be Divided by a Hundred). His poetry collection P.S., which includes poems written since the 1990s, was published in 2021 in Moscow.

Dmitri Manin

Dmitri Manin is a physicist, programmer, and poetry translator. His translations from English and French into Russian and from Russian to English have been published in books and journals, including Delos, Metamorphoses, The Cafe Review, Cardinal Points, and others. He won the first prize in the 2017 Compass Award competition. A book of his translations of Nikolay Zabolotsky’s poetry is upcoming from Arc Publications. He translated a number of poems for Disbelief: 100 Russian Anti-War Poems, published by Smokestack Books in January, 2023.

Agnes Marton

Agnes Marton is a Hungarian-born poet, writer, librettist, literary translator, Reviews Editor of The Ofi Press (Mexico), Art Curator at One Hand Clapping (UK), and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (UK). Recent publications include her collection Captain Fly’s Bucket List, four chapbooks with Moria Books (USA), and two collections published in Hungary: En, az iguana (Being an Iguana) and Jaguarfolyoso (Mission Jaguar). She won the National Poetry Day Competition in the UK and an ecopoetry competition in Hungary. An anthology she edited (Estuary: A Confluence of Art and Poetry) received the Saboteur Award. Her work is widely anthologized; some examples include Alice: Ekphrasis at the British Library and Anthem: A Tribute to Leonard Cohen. In the award-winning poetry exhibition project Guardian of the Edge 33, accomplished visual artists responded to her poetry. She has been a resident poet on a research boat in the Arctic Circle, at the Scott Polar Research Institute at the Cambridge University, and also in Iceland, Italy, Portugal, and Canada. Her poem “Fish Speech, Remember?” was performed by the BBC Singers. She has translated poems by Anna Terek, Bettina Simon, Zita Izso, Soma Kazsimer, Dario Szabo, Krisztian Biro, and others from Hungarian into English.

Mark Miscovich

Mark Miscovich is a freelance translator and author from Ohio who now lives in Vienna, Austria. He has published translations of several short stories and poems as well as two novels, Paris, Berlin, New York. Die Farbe der Stadt (Paris Berlin New York. The Color of the City) by the Austrian author Wolfgang Hermann and Die Liebe der beiden Frauen zu den Gärten (How They Love Their Gardens) by the Swiss author Christine Trüb. He has also authored several short stories, most recently “A Summer Like Back Then” in Tenth Muse.

Yuliya Musakovska

Yuliya Musakovska was born in 1982 in Lviv, Ukraine. She is an award-winning poet and translator. She has published five poetry collections in Ukrainian. The most recent, Бог свободи (The God of Freedom) (2021), is forthcoming in 2024 from Arrowsmith press in English translation by Olena Jennings and the author. Her bilingual collection, Żelazo / Залізо (Iron) (2022), with translation by Aneta Kaminska, was published in Poland by The Borderland Foundation. In 2023, a joint chapbook of poems by Yuliya, Stones and Nails, and Daryna Gladun, War Does Not Start Tomorrow, in translation by Mikael Nydahl, was published in Sweden by Ariel/Ellerströms. Yuliya has received numerous literary awards in Ukraine, including the prominent Smoloskyp Poetry Award for young authors and the Dictum Prize from Krok Publishing House. Her individual poems have been translated into nearly 30 languages and published internationally, recently appearing in AGNI, The Common, Tupelo Quarterly, NELLE, The Continental, Two Letters, The Red Letter Poem Project, Apofenie, etc. Yuliya is a translator of Tomas Tranströmer to Ukrainian and of contemporary Ukrainian poets into English. She is a member of PEN Ukraine. Yuliya has a Master’s degree in International Affairs from Lviv National University and has been working IT since 2007.

José Ovejero

José Ovejero is a contemporary Spanish author who has published extensively. His oeuvre includes collections of poetry, short stories, plays, novels, and travel narratives as well as anthologized short stories and essays. He has received numerous literary prizes for his works of fiction, including the Primavera prize for the novel Las vidas ajenas (The Lives of Others) (2005); the Ramón Gómez de la Serna prize for La comedia salvaje (The Savage Comedy) (2011); and the Alfaguara Prize for the novel La invención del amor (The Invention of Love) (2013). He was awarded the Observatorio D’Achtall Award in 2016 for his collected literary works, and in 2017, he received the Juan Gil-Albert poetry prize for his poetry collection Mujer lenta (Slow Woman).

Mykyta Ryzhykh

Mykyta Ryzhykh is a winner of the international competition Art Against Drugs and the Ukrainian contests Vytoky, Shoduarivska Altanka, and Khortytsky dzvony; laureate of the literary competition named after Tyutyunnik, Lyceum, and Twelve, named after Dragomoshchenko; and finalist for the Crimean ginger competition. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Partha Sarkar

Partha Sarkar, a resident of Ichapur, a small town in the province West Bengal of India, writes poems inspired by the late Sankar Sarkar and his friends (especially Deb kumar Khan) to protest against social injustice and crimes against nature. His poems have been in different magazines both in Bangla and in English. Once, he believed in revolution, but now he is confused by the obscurity of human beings, though he keeps fire in his soul.

Mykhaylo Semenko

Mykhaylo Semenko (1892 – 1937 ) is a representative of the Ukrainian "Executed Renaissance" repressed in the USSR.

Bernardo Villela

Bernardo Villela has had poetry published by Entropy, Zoetic Press, Bluepepper, and Eldritch & Ether and poetry translations by New Delta Review. You can read more about these and various others of his pursuits at www.miller-villela.com.

郑小琼 (Zheng Xiaoqiong)

郑小琼 (Zheng Xiaoqiong) was born in the city of Nanchong, Sichuan on June 18, 1980. She studied at a nursing school and initiated her career working in a hospital, where she remained till 2001. That year she moved to Dongguan and started working in different factories as an assembly-line worker. There she began writing poetry about the working conditions she endured, the life in the factories, the relationships between coworkers, etc. In 2007 she won the Liqun Literary Award, which transformed her into a well-known poet inside and outside the borders of China. She is the author of several books of poetry such as女工记 (Women Migrant Workers), 黄麻岭 (Huangmaling), 郑小琼诗选 (Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Selected Poems), 纯种植物 (Pure Plant), and人行天桥 (Pedestrian Overpass), among others.

Anna Zimna

Anna Zimna was born in 1994. She graduated in English literary studies at the University of Opole with a master's thesis supervised by poet and translator Jacek Gutorow. She translates from Polish and English and is currently working on the Polish translation of D. H. Lawrence’s novel The Rainbow. This year, she published her debut poems on the website of a Wroclaw publishing house and is developing a manuscript. On a daily basis, she works in a primary school as a teacher’s assistant. She has completed postgraduate studies in library science and is currently a postgraduate student in pedagogy. After hours, she likes reading novels and listening to alternative and classical music. She lives in Kędzierzyn-Koźle.

Languages in translation

Arabic Bengali Chinese French German Hungarian Italian Polish Portuguese Russian Spanish Ukrainian

Places represented

Algeria; Arkansas; Brazil; Budapest, Hungary; Cagliari, Sardinia, Italy; Chicago; Dongguan, China; Estonia; Fez, Morocco; French West Indies; Germany; Ichapur, West Bengal of India, India; Kędzierzyn-Koźle, Poland; Kiev, Ukraine; Krakow, Poland; Lisbon, Portugal; Łódź, Poland; Luxembourg, Hungary; Lviv, Ukraine; Nanchong, Sichuan, China; New York City; Rome, Italy; Scotland; Southern California; Spain; Syria; Turin, Piedmont, Italy; Ukraine; Vienna, Austria; Włocławek, Poland

AzonaL's largest mission is to publish not only gorgeous translations, but those that champion under-served poets. Please refrain from sending translations of work that has already been spread significantly to English readers (e.g., Neruda) unless there is significant nuance happening.

Submissions are welcomed over email to contact@azonaltranslation.com year-round. Send about 4 poems you have translated into English in a single file with the corresponding poems in their source language following each translation (DOC/DOCX preferred). The body of your email should contain a short cover letter with your bio (up to 200 words), the translated poet's bio (up to 200 words), and an assurance that you have been given the appropriate rights to translate and publish the translations in a magazine. Simultaneous submissions are permitted, and as soon as you know your work has been accepted elsewhere, email contact@azonaltranslation.com to withdraw it. More than one (a multiple) submission between issues are not considered.

Publication will transpire online; there is no payment for contributors, but the transportability of the free, online format is meant to serve translators, poets, and the field.

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AzonaL is an online magazine of translated poetry publishing issues biannually. Begun at the inception of 2020, AzonaL washes across lines and limits, is earthly and untethered. The word "azonal" in English is geographic, of soils. Morphing/new. The magazine pushes forth writing that must be seen, now, anew—in translation, which is communication and creation.

Editor: Julia Leverone, julialeverone.com
Cover art: Rachel Walter, rachelwalter.com

contact@azonaltranslation.com