Tag Archives: Translation Review
Expanding Translation Routes in the Caribbean: Music, Memory, and the Sea in Alecia McKenzie’s “Marins désarmés/Unarmed Mariners” and Daniel Thaly’s “Looting Hummingbirds”
The recent publication of Jamaican writer Alecia McKenzie’s Marins désarmés/Unarmed Mariners (Vieux-Habitants, Guadeloupe: Atlantiques déchaînés, 2025) alongside Dominican poet Daniel Thaly’s Looting Hummingbirds (London & Trafalgar, Dominica: Papillote Press, 2026) offers an opportunity to reflect on contemporary Caribbean poetry’s engagements with mobility, memory, and translation. While distinct in form and emphasis, both collections are bilingual, pairing each source text with a parallel translation: McKenzie’s collection presents English poems alongside French translations by C. and S. Renard, whereas Thaly’s selected poems present French texts alongside English translations by Mark Andrews and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, who also co-edited the volume.
The Translation Review: Why it Matters and How to Do it Right. Part 2.
A book review can benefit significantly from discussing translation. Reviews that do engage with the translator’s approach provide the reader with a more profound analysis of cultural context and themes while maintaining some of the positive aspects of mainstream reviews, such as prioritizing readability and analyzing how certain audiences will react to certain texts.