Jacquelyn Pope

Jacquelyn Pope is a writer and translator. She is the author of the poetry collection Watermark (Marsh Hawk Press, 2005) and the translator of Hester Knibbe’s Hungerpots: New and Selected Poems (Eyewear Publishing, 2015). Pope’s poetry, essays, and translations from Dutch and Afrikaans have appeared in journals such as Asymptote, the Common, PN Review, and Poetry magazine. She is the recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant and a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, in addition to awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

Speaking of how translation has influenced her own work as a lyric poet, Pope told Poetry International that as both poet and translator, “I go a little bit word by word, or phrase by phrase anyway. I’m more aware of the ineffable ‘something’ that can hunker behind a poem, refusing to be translated, but stoking the engine of it nonetheless. I think that ‘something’ can be present in English-language poems, too, so it’s less an issue of translation maybe than different methods of apprehension. But it’s still amazing to me how poems, filtered through the vocabularies and imaginations of different translators, can have such varying resonances and effects, at least on me as a reader. I think we are very fortunate that such attention is (finally) being paid to translation and the gifts it creates.”