Patricio Ferrari

Patricio Ferrari is a polyglot poet, literary translator, and editor. He has published nearly 20 translated or edited books, including Habla terreña by Frank Stanford, co-translated with Graciela S. Guglielmone (Editorial Pre-Textos, 2024); The Complete Works of Álvaro de Campos, co-translated with Margaret Jull Costa (New Directions, 2023); Verde amargo by Martin Corless-Smith, co-translated with Graciela S. Guglielmone (Buenos Aires Poetry, 2022); The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro, coedited with Jerónimo Pizarro and co-translated with Margaret Jull Costa (New Directions, 2020); and The Galloping Hour: French Poems by Alejandra Pizarnik, co-translated with Forrest Gander (New Directions, 2018). 

Ferrari’s work has also appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, The New York Review of Books, Fence, the Southwest Review, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, Words Without Borders, and other publications. His academic work has been published in scholarly journals such as The Translator, Pessoa Plural, Variaciones Borges, Proverbium, and Rhythmica.

Ferrari has lived in New York since 2017, where he is an adjunct professor at Rutgers University-Newark and Sarah Lawrence College and collaborates with the Endangered Language Alliance (ELA), a nonprofit that documents Indigenous, minority, and endangered languages. He is also the host of World Poetry in Translation, a reading series he established to showcase poetry in translation.

Ferrari was born in Merlo, Buenos Aires, to Piemontesi and Calabresi immigrants who settled in the outskirts of the city at the turn of the 20th century. He left Argentina at age 16 to attend high school and play soccer in the United States as part of the Rotary Exchange Program. After a successful season at Strath Haven High School in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, in the fall of 1992, he was offered a soccer scholarship, first at Campbellsville University in Kentucky and then at Slippery Rock University, where he played Division II soccer and graduated as Senior of the Year with a BA in Philosophy and French. Ferrari earned an MA in comparative literature from Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, an MFA in poetry from Brown University, and a PhD in linguistics from Universidade de Lisboa with a dissertation on the prosody of Fernando Pessoa’s trilingual poetry.