Description
Poetry. Translation from French to English by Eléna Rivera, of Isabella Baladine Howard's PHANTOMB.
Translator’s Note:
“hantome ” (here translated as “phantomb”) is a word the author made up out of two words “hante” meaning “haunted and “fantome” meaning “phantom”. In French, “fantome” carries an additional meaning; it can mean a card that is left on a library shelf to show that a book has been borrowed (see the Larousse definition that Howald uses as an epigraph.) Wanting to give some of the flavor of these various meanings in English, I combined the word “phantom” and the word “tomb” to make the word “phantomb”.
Author Bio
Isabelle Baladine Howald lives and works in Strasbourg, where she pursued her studies in philosophy and now directs the "Philosophical and Literary Encounters" of the Librairie Kleber. From 1980 to 1982 she edited the literary journal ANIMA (Jacques Bremond publishers). Her books of poetry include Nuit d'amour un livre (1985), Les noms, tres bas (1986), both published by editions A Passage, Lettre de Pomeranie (1996) and Les Etats de la demolition (2002), published by editions Jacques Bremond. Our present volume, Secret des souffles, is her most recent book (editions Melville, 2004).
Author City: Strasbourg USA
Elena Rivera is a poet and translator who was born in Mexico City and spent her formative years in Paris. She won the 2010 Robert Fagles prize for her translation of Bernard Noel's The Rest of the Voyage (Graywolf Press, 2011) and is a recipient of a 2010 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Translation. She has also translated four of Isabelle Baladine Howald's books, the most recent being the forthcoming PHANTOMB (Black Square Editions, 2021), and two chapbooks by Sandra Moussempes (above/ground press, 2017 & 2021). Elena's latest books of poetry are Epic Series (Shearsman, 2021) and Scaffolding (Princeton University Press, 2017). She has also received fellowships from the Djerassi Foundation, the Witter Bynner Poetry Translator Residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute, and the MacDowell Colony.
Author City: USA