This sonnet translated from the Spanish of Lope de Vega was a finalist for the Barnstone Translation Prize and appeared in The Evansville Review.

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Bal­tasar de Alcázar (1530−1606) is one of the few poets of his day who con­sis­tently allowed him­self to be funny. He is some­times called the “gas­tro­nomic poet” because he often wrote about food and drink. Here is my trans­la­tion of his most famous poem, “Tres Cosas” (Three Things). The trans­la­tion was orig­i­nally pub­lished in the Rain­town Review and later reprinted in Per Contra.

Gabriela Mis­tral (1889−1957) was a Chilean poet, diplo­mat and edu­ca­tor. She won the Nobel Prize in 1945, the only Latin Amer­i­can woman to have done so. She wrote fre­quently about chil­dren and par­ent­hood, although she had no chil­dren of her own. Her work includes many lul­la­bies, of which this trans­la­tion is one. The trans­la­tion orig­i­nally appeared in String Poet.

This is a little-​known, funny poem by Bal­tasar de Alcázar (1530−1606) about the dan­ger of rhyming. If any­one else has trans­lated the poem before me, or even taken much notice of it in Span­ish, I have yet to dis­cover evi­dence on the Inter­net. Of course, it was even more essen­tial than usual that the trans­la­tion be a rhyming one, given that rhyme itself is the sub­ject of the poem. My thanks to Bill Thomp­son for pub­lish­ing this in the Alabama Lit­er­ary Review (2012).

Although it may seem quixotic to trans­late a poem by Miguel de Cer­vantes, I couldn’t resist tilt­ing at wind­mills for this short lyric, “I Look for Life in Death.” The trans­la­tion originally appeared in Leviathan Quar­terly and was later included in Poems for a Liminal Age, an anthology in support of Médecins Sans Frontières.

This is a son­net by the great Argen­tin­ian writer, Jorge Luis Borges, on the sub­ject of his blind­ness. The trans­la­tion was first pub­lished in the Alabama Lit­er­ary Review.